Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

The End

But all of a sudden John and Deau were there. Look, it’s all over, I said. What is, Sport? they said. They had someone with them. This guy is a beekeeper, John said. My bees make good honey, the beekeeper said. He had quite a nose. It looked like it was about ready to fall off. The two of us sat up and moved over, and John and Deau sat down beside us on the blanket, and the beekeeper, standing off at a slight remove, settled right into talking. He was quite a beekeeper. He seemed to favor words of more than two syllables, and gave quite a speech on a number of interconnected subjects, despite the nose, which really did look, the whole time he was holding forth, as if it was about to tumble off his face onto the grass and maybe even bounce very lightly once or twice when it did. That evening after dinner, having thought carefully about what the beekeeper had said, or having attempted to, I told John that nature was not in the least bit fascinating and that there was nothing natural about it and that honey baskets and pollen hunts were creepy, as were, if you thought about it, velocity and preponderance, not to mention minute digestive tracts, and that nature didn’t have any fucking plan, and the elements, all ninety-fucking-two of them, in fact the entire fucking periodic table of elements and all the other charts the old beekeeper had mentioned, could go fuck themselves, and that whatever I had said about it in the past was untrue, and that, furthermore, he, John, had been absolutely fucking right that time to go berserk and beat the shit out of me. Shut up, said John. Correctly. Then we went back to the city.

IN THE CITY, THEN, IT WAS ALL WORSE AND ALL OVER AND ALL everything, but we were not quite there yet. We were not quite there when we began being there by dropping them off at her apartment, the car quiet for a moment as we all said good-bye. Then, still not quite arrived, John and I returned the car to the rental agency and walked back over the river to my apartment. It was much colder in the city, even if we were not quite there yet, than it had been in the country. It was cold and a wind was blowing, a real wind, and we had bags to carry and were underdressed. The river, even with all its real and reflected bridges receding off into the distance, looked unforgiving and slightly angry. If it is possible for a river to look angry. I think it is.

Then we had arrived.

As a boy, I lived for a time in a room that looked out across a small empty lot onto a high white wall somewhere in a very small town, somewhere. The wall was as wide as it was high and, itself windowless, filled my window entirely. It was to this large white wall that I woke each morning, and it was at this large white wall, dimly illuminated by service lights, that I looked each night. Sometimes, during the day, birds flew along the wall. Or threw their shadows onto it. But that was all. For years. In its near impeccable blankness, is what I would like to say, it produces a memory, this wall, that, upon conclusion of the incidents I would now like to relate, I found, and in fact continue to find, soothing.

Then, I repeat, we had arrived.

Both in the city and at my apartment, which had been taken to pieces.

John looked at me, then at the remnants of the apartment, then went berserk.

Fuck, I said, for my part. Several times.

When he was calmer, which was some minutes later, he asked for an explanation.

What he said was, yours or theirs?

Mine.

Yours?

Yes.

What the fuck?

I know.

You don’t know anything.

True.

You don’t know shit.

Yes.

He picked something up off the floor and said, I bought this nifty keepsake in a little market on the side of a mountain in the middle of a rainstorm.

He held up a piece of it.

He held up a piece of something else.

I said something.

He said, fuck you, then we kind of wrestled around a little until he was on top of me.

Uncle? he said.

Yeah, uncle, I said.

Say Uncle John.

I said it.

He got off.

He walked around a little.

Then he sat down.

Okay, he said. Okay, fine. All right.

I nodded.

He looked at me.

We sat there.

All right, so why did they do this?

I shrugged.

He grabbed the back of my neck, pulled me forward a little, and punched me.

So I told him. Everything.

He agreed with me, 100-fucking-percent as he put it, that my actions or nonactions or whatever the hell I wanted to call them had been stupid.

Nice work, Mr. Jackass, is exactly what he said.

I asked him if I could get him anything. Maybe a snack or something.

He said, yeah.

I said, what?

He said, shut up for fuck’s sake, stupid, what did you do with it?

I told him.

He looked at me.

So why haven’t they gotten it yet?

Because I think I may have put the wrong address on it.

Jesus, he said.

Speaking of stupid, or of stupidly, I am put in mind of the following anecdote once told to me, or actually twice. A former colleague was set the task, well within her expertise, of executing the following procedure: (1) removing someone’s kidney; (2) laying said someone on his / her back in a bathtub full of ice cubes; (3) placing a note on his / her chest, which would read along the lines of, if you would like to live please dial Emergency. Part 1 was approached carefully. Part 2 was accomplished neatly. Part 3 was unfortunately, however, forgotten, too bad, effectively botching the exercise, which had been meant only to serve as a warning. Later I tried recounting the anecdote, but could not remember which part of the procedure the former colleague had left out, and so subsequently solicited and received a retelling of the anecdote by a colleague who was neither the one who figured as the hero of the anecdote, nor the one who had first told it to me, but rather was a third colleague, who for practical reasons was also intimately acquainted with the details of the affair.

I am not entirely certain, in this instance, that I have used the word, hero, correctly.

Ah, well.

It suddenly occurred to us that what was stupid was for us to be sitting there.

On the way out the door, John said, not without justification, and I suppose it would have ruined your little instance of intractability to just bring it back to them, and I said, yeah, I guess.

We decided to split up. First, though, we tried to call her apartment. No answer. Several possible reasons presented themselves, a couple of which neither of us wished to contemplate, and we decided that we would each, individually, continue to try calling, because going over there right now was out of the question. We split up. Each of us, as it occurred, with someone following. A little while later I got clubbed on the head.

But first, for a while, I went through the city with someone following me. I have already mentioned that it was cold. Then it started to rain. It was the sort of rain, as it has been throughout, that is far from being pleasant. And perhaps because of thinking about the unpleasant rain falling on and around me, and, by extension I suppose, about the sometimes mysterious and unpleasant rain that I had used to hear falling behind the stretch of wall in my apartment, not to mention, at times, behind a much larger stretch of wall in my dreams, I thought of the downstairs neighbor and of the hole puncher and of John’s account of his dealings with the downstairs neighbor, I mean of how he had dealt with the downstairs neighbor, and of tenant relations, that too, absurdly.

I walked along the river in the rain for a while, then stopped walking along the river. This for two reasons. Three. One was the fact that John had, so recently, told the story, or rather, the expurgated story, of our experience with the corpse in the flowered skirt, which is, with several facts added to it, entirely different. I don’t know why, in fact, he felt obliged to bring it up. All of it was a mistake, right from the start, both in its inception, and in its absurd conclusion — the part which I described John relating while we all sat telling each other stories under a tree.