Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

Are you all right? my client said.

I turned away from my secretary, bowed, and assured her that I was. I also told her that it had been an absolute pleasure carrying out her assignment, and that if she should have any future need of an investigator, she could call me.

Good, she said.

Excellent, I said.

She handed me the money, shook, I think, my hand, nodded at my secretary, and left.

I was somewhat less comfortable than I like to be after that. I stood for a time in the doorway, between my room and my secretary’s, listing a little, first to one side then to the other, and all the while my secretary, apparently not the slightest bit nonplussed by my outburst, spoke to me. He spoke to me quietly and soothingly about the quality of the client who had just left — about her coat and about where, in his opinion, the coat had been purchased. He spoke to me about her hair and the line of her jawbone and about her blue eyes, which set off to such effect the large and tasteful rock she had been wearing around her neck. He spoke to me about the job, about how well I had carried it out, and about how well I had interacted with the client, and after he had gone on for some time in this vein I finally got it.

You want me to pay you, right? I said.

Yes, immediately please.

I gave him the money the client had handed me, and after counting it twice, somewhat ostentatiously licking his thumb in the process, he slipped it into his pocket, presumably satisfied. Then he went on talking for a while. He talked mostly about his mother — a favorite subject of his — and about a house they had once visited on a lake long ago. The house, which had belonged to his mother’s employer, had sat on a small promontory overlooking the enormous lake, which was notable both for its color — red — and its shape — a near perfect horseshoe. Each day, he and his mother would rise early and row out onto the lake, where, in my secretary’s phrase, surrounded by mist and bird song they would drop their lines. While they fished, and the fishing was excellent — they ate of it every night, his mother undertaking the bulk of the cleaning, so many small wet shapes, as my secretary put it, in the bucket, on the plate — his mother would tell him stories. Son, she would say, and she would tell him about something wonderful that had happened before he was born. She had been unusually old for a mother, so old it had always seemed to my secretary incredible that she had been able to pull it off, a point with which I, now leaning into the doorframe, or so I thought, completely concurred.

In fact, by now I had left my office and, on my way over to the transactions firm to attend to a little business, was running over the sequence of events in my head. Notable about this process was the nagging feeling that I had forgotten something, most likely something important, but I registered that this was not necessarily linked to the somewhat strange events I had just experienced, or rather to the somewhat strange way I had experienced the foregoing events; despite my relative youth during this period, I was already plagued by various failings in memory along with the concomitant anxieties this can provoke. And, my anxieties having further evolved, it troubled me to note (and this is simply the example that leaps to mind) that while I could very clearly recall telling the client about trailing her “husband,” I could no longer recall the trailing itself, and firmly suspected that the events might have occurred otherwise. In which case my performance on the job would have been somewhat less than satisfactory, a hypothesis I found deeply disturbing. I had, after all, accepted money from my client, and I was in no way interested in establishing myself as some moderately hard-boiled variety of charlatan. Clearly, the matter would require follow-up, even if only to put my mind at ease.

I have done many things in my life with the idea of putting my mind at ease. Having come now to this end of it, of life, I am none too happy to report that it is a hopeless task.

Be that as it may, however, it is too early in these proceedings to dwell on that, I soon found myself back at the transactions firm sharing a pleasant drink with three or four fellow transactionists. In accordance with long-standing tradition, drinks were shared in the copy room, and, if one required additional intimacy, in the large closet therein. No additional intimacy being required on this occasion, we stood and leaned against the various machines and reams of paper and drank from bottles and dubiously washed glasses. The largest of my colleagues, an important member of the firm’s junior staff, drank from a bowl. This was the individual who had helped me to set up my office and, in fact, had gotten me started in the firm. He was, as I say, quite a large individual, with much flesh to recommend him. Later — after the events I am setting down here that is — he would grow leaner, and an astonishingly handsome face would emerge from its fleshy encasement, or rather from its entombment, as he would put it, but during this period it was not his looks, or lack thereof, that distinguished him. It was his undeniable talent for transactions — far exceeding my own or that of any other member of the junior staff — that set him apart and ensured him a steady set of interviews with the boss.

It was of the boss that we were speaking as we drank. The boss, apparently something of an aficionado, had recently purchased a new line of track for the enormous electric train set that he kept in his office and which none of us, with the exception of our large colleague, or so I then thought, had seen. Later, I would learn that I had already seen the office and the boss and his train set under conditions both pleasant and less so, but at that moment I was convinced I had not, and so, despite my headache and liminal concerns, listened eagerly to our fleshy colleague’s description of it.

First of all, he said, you have to understand that the office itself is much larger than the ordinary office, both in terms of area and volume, so that one is only gradually struck by the remarkable size and complexity of the boss’s train set. It is quite a pleasant thing, then, to wander through the office and to discover aspect after novel aspect of that network. The mountain range and aerial bridge assert themselves only after one has considered the detailed curiosities of the tropical river and surrounding rain forest or vice versa. Just as the great city seems marvelous only after one has wandered through the desert wastes. This is perhaps a function of the track’s emphatic primacy, and of the single engine, black with a beautiful red smokestack, that is forever sliding along it. It was this circumstance that struck me, in fact — the engine never stops, and he, the boss, was kind enough to confirm this for me.

The engine, he says, will never stop, even as the dust forms high drifts on the savannah, the paint wears off the mountains, and the electric bulbs burn out in the great city’s miniature streetlights. It will continue along the ever-expanding network of track long after he has diverted the river, replaced the stand of rubber trees, and thrown away the plastic glacier. Those of us, he says, who perform satisfactorily, will one day be allowed to take a turn at the switchboard, to feel the curious thrill, the genuine but subtle sense of power, and of loss and bewilderment.

At this point our colleague fell silent and, as we were well along with our respective beverages, one of us suggested that it was time to see about our assignments for the evening. Assignments, in that firm, were generally posted in red marker on a white board outside the second secretary’s office, and the larger part of our number set off to see what had been arranged for them. Soon, in fact, it was just myself and the fleshy colleague left in the copy room.