Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

It took three trips to get home with all of it, sloshing.

That’s that, said John.

Then it was the day of the event.

It was a very nice event, and, insofar as my dreams afterward were concerned, it did have a temporary palliative effect, as had been the case with other events in the past, although I have never been sure just why.

Marry the crowd! John yelled at me as at one point we stood at the drinks table.

Was that a quote? I asked.

Pass it on, brother, he said.

I passed it to the guy standing next to me. This guy said it to the guy next to him, a very old guy with a nose like something in a documentary on gross anomalies. Who are you? I said walking up to the old guy. He said something. I didn’t quite catch it. I started to ask him again, but just then someone yelled, the event!

The lights went out.

There was a scream.

The lights came back on.

John was on top of someone.

The lights went out again.

They were out for a long time.

Later, a tall, skinny woman wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat came up to me and whispered, marry the crown, pass it on.

I passed it on to John.

John said, I just did, and grinned.

The room was crowded.

The crowded room spun around me.

Anyway, the first time she saw my apartment there were upwards of a hundred people in it. I exaggerate. But there were many, perhaps too many. Or at least this is how I put it to myself, because after a time, without telling me, she left.

I am an awful drunk. If I am not much present at the best of times, when I am drunk I devolve into something I think it would not be unfair to characterize as vaguely reptilian. I sit and sit and occasionally my eyes move. The last time I had been drunk — I mean before I got very drunk at the event and retracted, like something that might be happiest under a heat bulb, into a corner — I had been drunk in the presence, to speak euphemistically, of someone I was supposed to have been watching. I was supposed to have been watching him in case he chose at that late stage to say anything, but instead I sat on the floor behind him and took small sips from a large bottle I had been left with and got drunk, and when he did say something, in a very small voice, I said nothing, and alerted no one, and I stared at the back of his head, and drank, and after a time announced to myself that I no longer noticed the smell.

The day of the event was very sunny and then it was very rainy, and I was outside, attending to a few last details, in that rainy part of it.

It was not nice, this rain. It was a cold, thorough, ruin-your-fucking-universe kind of rain and I cringed each time great splashes of it hit my face.

It is unlovely to repeatedly cringe in public, and I found myself saying to myself, quit it.

Others heard me.

In fact, one person who heard me said, excuse me, and we struck up a conversation. It was not, to tell the truth, much of a conversation. Sometimes, I am capable of striking up successful conversations with complete strangers. Once, John watched me sit down at a table with someone in a crowded restaurant and talk until that other person, quite some time later, stood up to go. This incident greatly astonished John, who, though subjected during that period to my nightly outpourings, had never once before seen me address more than four or five words to anyone besides him. In fact, one time as the two of us stood at a counter with two acquaintances of the more pleasantly gendered persuasion, John described my almost total silence, as we stood there, as a condition — a condition I struggled with, gallantly. And I must say I frequently find myself returning, when I reflect on the varying success of my interactions, to the notion that I am struggling with some sort of condition.

I must be.

It is as if part of me falls into some great dark pit, though always only part of me.

Incidentally, this conversation I was having was with someone wearing large, reflective sunglasses.

Someone, I note again, who was tall and thin.

These are all details.

I am made nervous by events.

Strange things happen at them.

I took up a position in the kitchen. Then by the window. Then by my bed, for a moment, then by the door.

Finally, they arrived.

Hello, said Deau, very roundly breezing past me.

Hello, she said.

I brought her a drink and a plate of pickles and meats.

You have to meet John, I said.

Kiss me, she said.

It was quite an event. To his credit, John had managed to dig up a huge number of participants. I brought up the subject of John’s excellent technique and pointed over toward him. John, cleaned up now, was spinning around in the center of a small group with one of my pillows on his head. We stood there by the door, each drinking what I had brought over and nibbling on the pickles and meats. Comfortable. In fact, wonderful. But she didn’t stay long.

Later the next week, she said to me, after a certain point, and it is a very clear point, I cannot tolerate events, and that is why I left, but it was very nice to see your apartment and to meet John.

That’s fine absolutely anything is fine, I said.

I did not actually see them meet, but at one point John came over to me and said, okay, wow, then he went over to the kitchen, and a little after that is when he spilled wine on Deau, or vice-versa, and they laughed, and the two of them made the plan that the four of us should go away somewhere, perhaps to the country.

Given the circumstances, it was a wonderful trip.

There is always this question of circumstances.

Just before she left the event, for example, we kissed, right next to the table where I had piled the food, which had, by this time, been thoroughly massacred. We kissed and kissed, and when we were finished she explained to me that part of the point of her initiating the kiss, at that moment, had been that she was about to leave, and that insofar as she had imagined the event before arriving, that imagining had involved a kiss, any kind of kiss at any moment involving me, and that the earlier kiss by the door when she arrived had been nice but insufficient, and that was the reason for it, if it needed a reason, and she was happy, even if she had not stayed long, that she had come.

Yes, I said.

Yes, I said again.

Yes.

John rented a car and the four of us drove off toward the country.

On the drive the two of us fell easily into the habit of discussing objects and words. John and Deau did not participate in our discussions and did not appear, at any point, to have any interest in doing so, but that didn’t bother us, and as we stopped along the way, we made several acquisitions, which would appear, later, on her shelves.

It was an excellent drive.

I did, however, of course, still harbor one or two creeping fears, but I was not cringing, and there was no rain, it was sunny, the event was over, and I was the better for it. Speaking, however, about rain — the rain that day of the event. At the end of our lame conversation the tall, thin individual I was talking to invited me, quite firmly, to enter a nearby building and go upstairs.

I do not know why I said yes to what they asked me to do when I got upstairs, I did not have to say yes, that had always been part of our agreement, but I did.

That I had said yes was why I said to John, a couple of days after the event when we were recovered and were discussing travel plans, let’s go here.

Why? said John.

I’ve heard it’s beautiful, I said.

John has never approved of my engagement with this world, a world for which he has always found me, rightly I suppose, ill-suited. Quite a number of years before, in fact, he had helped me to get started in another line, one that for various reasons I did not pursue.