Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

The individual who had let us in let us out through another door. This individual had been silent throughout our visit and seemed not at all predisposed to engage in the kind of banter that is often characteristic of these assignments. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he too had been struck by our surroundings and was engaged in musings of his own as he led us through the all but dark. (I asked him about this when some days later I had the opportunity to converse with him. He told me that he had thought of nothing, that when he was working he did not think, but that he liked the idea of decay, especially insofar as it applied to himself. How do you feel about plasma-based propulsion systems? I asked him. Why? Because that’s what I was thinking about while we were there. Sorry, but I don’t care too much about that.) Still, as we left, John, who at the opening of the door found, he later told me, a sense of levity returning, made a remark regarding the quality and prodigious size of our colleague’s external accoutrements, which elicited the beginnings of a smile from the individual. This beginning of a smile, in its turn, when we had stepped out through a green metal door and into the dark alley beyond it, reminded me of something (see above — my first case, a certain set of minutes unaccounted for).

Are you missing part of one of your teeth, the right incisor? I asked him as he was preparing to shut the door.

Yes, he said. And as he said it, perhaps in a moment of empathy for the body we had in the bag, I found myself drifting back through the dark equipment to lie for a moment in the open turbine. Before long though I found myself back with John, walking along one dark street after another as we made our way to the river. We were discussing our thoughts on the interior of the power station and also the desirability of live/work spaces. Neither one of us had ever lived in a loft and we agreed that the prospect of so much renovated space had its appeal. My apartment at that time was a renovated space. It had once been the office of a fairly successful tailor who had returned, the housing agent had told me, to another country to die. When I moved in there were some scraps of cloth and thread on the floor behind the radiators, and in one of the closets I found a needle and a pin. Later, when John moved in with me and we became roommates, we found a bolt of blue cloth beneath one of the floorboards, and John had shirts made for each of us. This was not long after the events I am currently attempting to give some account of, that is to say after the conclusion of the present case and my retirement from the investigation business. This was not a happy moment, as you might imagine, but it seemed a necessary one. Now, of course, all these years later, I see how things might have been different for me if my speculations had been more probing and if my conclusions had been more prescient and if certain events had not unfolded as they did.

They did.

We reached the river.

John said, wait here, swung the bag up over his shoulder and walked off into the gloom.

But instead of waiting for him, as our briefing note directed, by the crates of rotten carrots, beets, and yellow squash that lined the walls of the warehouses we were now behind, it occurred to me that without actually doing so, or at any rate seeming to, I might in fact follow him, or try. I took this decision in an attempt to consciously effect the phenomenon that had lately, and as recently as the turbine, afflicted me, in light of the considerable amount of advice my earlier visitor had imparted to me, and not just concerning my pulse.

It worked. I walked beside John, I walked behind him, I walked in front.

There are other things you can do, she had told me. And if, as you say, you are currently engaged in a potential homicide case, you will find some of the modalities of your condition quite useful.

This seemed useful. John, instead of taking the bag to the river and dropping it over the side, simply, in walking, leaned his shoulder into one of the ubiquitous crates by the water’s edge, causing it to fall into the dark water (a sound I would later remember having heard as I stood waiting by the warehouse for John), while he continued on a little farther, at which point he was met by a certain individual, difficult to make out in the half dark, until he smiled and showed his cracked incisor. There followed both an exchange of words and of knowing expressions, and also of the bag, which the individual hefted onto his own shoulder and set off with. Pushing my luck a little further, I followed along with this individual as he made his way back through the crates and into an alley not far from where I stood waiting and where John would momentarily rejoin me.

We walked through the same set of alleys John and I had negotiated in carrying the body to the docks and, before long (it was necessary to be impressed by this individual’s robustness) we were back at the green door, where, instead of following the individual into the machines and the dark, I began, light as one of the lesser elements, to float up the side of the building into the night sky.

One will be sure to think it possible, even necessary, to draw certain conclusions from this episode, and I was subsequently both willing and almost eager to do so.

1) Necessarily, for instance, something was afoot; 2) That something involved me; 3) As well as the case I was working on; 4) Possibly; 5) John had something to do with it; 6) The transactions firm had something to do with it; 7) I was a ghost.

This possibility had been presented to me by my earlier visitor, herself, she alleged, a ghost.

What do you mean you’re a ghost?

I’m a ghost, I’m dead, I do things.

And yet here you are.

But then she wasn’t.

Suddenly she was standing behind me.

She put her hands over my eyes.

It was possible to see through them a little.

All this means, I said, gesturing with my drink, is that I’ve been feeling a little unusual lately. I see through your hands because I’m so sleepy. I’ve been working two jobs and keeping some pretty strange hours and talking to some pretty strange customers and doing some pretty ugly things. Likely, you’re not even here.

I’m not, she said. Which is to say that I am and am not. I’m also elsewhere.

Where?

I don’t know.

But you’ve floated over here to inform me that I’m a ghost.

I didn’t float. I try not to. Voluntary use of such capacities tends to over determine them, makes it difficult to get back.

What do you mean by “get back”?

To my body.

So you do know where it is.

No, I don’t. All I know is it’s dark — or that my eyes don’t work. Which is a possibility. It happens in a pretty high percentage of cases.

And how did you learn all this?

There is literature available.

Literature?

Yes.

Listen, I said, I appreciate the scotch and you and your weird small hands and legs, but I have to get to work. I’ve just been having some mediocre out-of-body experiences, which a couple of pounds of food and some sleep will remedy.

You won’t sleep, she said.

I have to go, I said.

But we sat and drank and she said other things.

8) She said it was akin, at times, to a dream state, that at times I would like it, that at times I would not.

Can I walk through walls? I said.

Haven’t you already?

I thought about that.

And also, she said, barely there, you are divisible — can be barely there in more than one place, send off slivers of yourself. Then there are mirrors.

What about them?

A ghost sees many things in a mirror, but never him/herself.

So how come just after I got my bruise I could see myself in the mirror in my office?

It takes time for the condition to fully assert itself. Try it now.