Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

Well, Sport, he said.

We clinked beverages.

I’m glad it’s just the two of us, I said. I had been hoping to have a moment with you before we got started.

Sure, Sport, no problem, he said.

But the truth is I really didn’t have much of an idea about where to get started. There were several things I hadn’t quite understood about what he had said about the boss’s train set, although I had very much enjoyed his intervention. I told him as much.

Thank you, he said.

Yes, I said. While there were several things I couldn’t quite grasp, I found that your description of the network made me think of deltas.

Deltas?

Not the track — the track doesn’t branch off, it seems — but the visitor to the network experiences a certain measure of branching and expansion in his/her thoughts, presumably. For instance, from the great city to the mountains, but also, simultaneously to the rubber forest and the river, and the tiny lights.

Why are you talking to me about deltas?

I’m not sure.

We stood there.

He told me a joke.

He said, one more for the road?

We had one more.

Deltas, he said.

I told him that it was likely my investigation work that had led me to think of them.

That’s great, Sport, he said.

It’s just that both the blood system in the brain and trees look a lot like deltas if you make a schematic of them. I have been trying to determine how I might make a schematic of a crime or rather of a perpetrator’s actions during the commission of a crime.

You don’t look so good, he said.

I don’t feel so good.

He patted me on the shoulder then pulled a very large bag of unshelled peanuts out of his jacket pocket and offered me a handful.

We put our glasses away.

Let’s go check the board now, Sport.

Okay, but first tell me, where was I last night between 5 and 5:30 p.m.?

You were with me, Sport, don’t you remember?

In fact, now that he mentioned it, I did remember. I could very clearly recall that we had worked together all afternoon and well into the evening. We had worked together on a very unpleasant job; or rather — unpleasant is the wrong word — it was difficult. They were sometimes. Perhaps, then, I had gotten my time frame wrong; perhaps I had trailed my client’s husband the night previous to the previous one; perhaps. Perhaps, indeed, but even if that was the case, my earlier description notwithstanding, I still couldn’t remember having done it. At this juncture, however, my case-related ruminations were cut short by another of my colleagues, who popped his head into the copy room and said, let’s go, Champ, you’re with me.

For the next few hours then, I was very much occupied in some business, a tricky but rewarding transaction for which we acquired a trunk, a razor, and thirty feet of rope. And while it is certainly true that over the course of the evening my thoughts reverted to my client’s lovely bones and perfume and snug-fitting raincoat, I did not trouble myself, or rather had no time to trouble myself, with the residual time- and memory-related vagaries of the case, for which, after all, and this had to indicate an adequate measure of success, I had been quite handsomely paid.

Several days went by. I barely noticed them. In fact one or two of them I did not notice at all and what’s more, when they did come to my attention, a quick inventory revealed that I had nothing in my possession that could definitively account for them.

Incidentally, this has remained a problem. Here, for example, whole weeks slip by, entire months are simply sucked away from me, and I’m left lying in bed in the middle of what should have been.

At any rate, I soon found myself back in the office, back at my desk. Since I had last been there my secretary had made several improvements, including having an intercom system installed so that I would not have to move or shout in order to contact him. I found this arrangement highly satisfactory. We both did. In fact, I quickly took to conducting the larger part of my business with him through the intercom. This was in part to cut down on the number of times I was forced to gaze upon his teeth — so medieval in their aspect — in part because I liked the sound of his voice as it came through the small speaker, and, when we talked at mealtime, the sound he made while eating the moist, warm dishes he favored, his lips smacking lightly at the soft foods. Also I liked to click down on the “communicate” button. It was lovely to do so — to speak then hear a voice in return.

In this way I learned more about the red lake and about his mother and various other things. He in his turn, if he was listening, I could not always be sure that he was, learned various things about me; for example, that I, too, in my earlier years, had gone out in the early morning with a relative onto a lake, although the lake I had gone out onto had not been red, it had been a very murky green. Mostly I would fish, but occasionally my relative, at the time sadly moribund, would instruct me to pull up my line and let go of the oars so that we would “just drift.” Sometimes, as we drifted through the mist across the green lake, my relative would speak. More often, though, my relative remained silent, staring over the side of the boat or into the mist or at me.

At me was the least desirable direction.

There were cataracts involved.

My objection was not aesthetic.

My relative could barely see me: I was barely seen.

It was hard for me to remember that this condition was temporary; that my perceived half presence—“I can hardly see you — wave your arms or something”—would not extend beyond the bounds of the boat, once we had left the misty lake and returned to shore.

It wasn’t.

Temporary I mean.

Are you listening? I said.

There was a silence, quite a long one, and then my secretary said, Yes.

This was true, I thought — I could see him, quite clearly, leaning over the intercom, his chin in his hands, smiling sweetly, attentive, staring at the red light that, illuminated, indicated that the line was open. I should say that since the previous occasion, I had had no such convincing visual confirmation of my secretary’s or anyone else’s activities as they sat in rooms other than the one I sat in. Only once, in fact, during the days that had elapsed (although clearly I do not, here, include the days I could not account for), had anything at all “curious” in this regard happened. One evening, one or two nights previously, as I had lain in bed attempting to sleep — I could not — I had very clearly heard a lawn tractor, with the mower engaged, maybe two or three feet from my bed, and above the sound of the lawn tractor, the sound of my grandmother calling out my name.

I have still not decided whether this event was connected to the predicament I was in then, the predicament I came only quite slowly to recognize, and only lately to fully accept. The business about “seeing” my secretary helped to push this process along. Which is to say that, remembering that I had seen things incorrectly the last time, I stood, crossed the room — very quietly: my secretary, as part of his improvements, had had plush carpet installed — and jerked open the door to the front room.

Hello, I said.

Sitting in one of the two chairs reserved for waiting clients was a very small man wearing a raincoat. It was hard to make out his features, as he was wearing a hat with a wide brim. I could see the end of his nose (large) and his lips (moist, thin). His chin was square and his jaw unusually heavy.

I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, I said. Have you seen my secretary?

I asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a walk down the hall, just for a few minutes, you understand.