Laird Hunt - The Impossibly

It wasn’t her, he had said after I had heard the shot and he had climbed back to the car where I was waiting for him.

What do you mean? I had said.

I mean it wasn’t her. I didn’t get a good look until after it was done.

That was one reason. Another was the earlier and above-mentioned bit of business I had done for the organization I was now in trouble with.

That bit of business had involved this river, a big bag, and some rocks.

The third, strangely, was the beekeeper, and his monologue about nature and God-knows-what.

Nature, had said the beekeeper, is really quite intelligent. Both as to its inceptions — he was the first to have used these words — and its conclusions. Do you wish, he had asked us, to speak of punctuation? Do you wish to speak of commas and semicolons? Ellipses and apostrophes? Nature possesses it all. Take for example your average bee. Happening to have a dead one or two in his pocket, he had done so. He went pretty fast. He went from bees to planets and from grammar to physics in about three-and-a-half sentences. It was, the dead bee he had passed around, a planet in a solar system and the solar system in the galaxy and the galaxy in the universe. He explained the connections. Which allowed for curved space and chaos theory and dark matter and a few other things. It did all seem quite intelligent. The way he described it. Extremely.

So what you are saying is that everything is dead like the average bee? I asked him.

But at that moment he was called away.

Walking along the river I found myself wondering if, in all its morpho / syntactical brilliance, nature would be smart enough to make me, say, take a bullet in the back of the head.

After the beekeeper had concluded his discourse, which he had only ended because his wife, somewhere off in the distance, had begun calling him with a bullhorn, we talked about honey for a while. We had all, we confessed to each other, been pleasantly lulled by the old man’s voice and dead bees and chewed-up nose — it was only later that I became agitated. We lay there on our backs talking about honey, about its different colors and grades — yum, we said — and wondered aloud if dead bees produced ghosts as dead fleas, it had been said, did, and if ghosts of bees would go on making honey and what that honey would taste like, probably not so good, though we couldn’t be sure, but sooner or later we’d find out, and we concluded that nature, especially given the creation of honey, all kinds of honey, really was, as the beekeeper had said, quite smart.

Honey was smart.

Honey was brilliant.

Even if I, another aspect of nature’s expression, wasn’t.

That night, incidentally, out there in the country with her, I dreamed hooks again.

And again, in the face of my utter distress, she was admirably, heartbreakingly calm.

I called her apartment. She answered. I got clubbed over the head.

That was certainly a clear-enough conclusion.

Think of its complexity, the beekeeper had said. I would require an entire sheet of paper to list all the treasures it contains. It is so very, very complex, he had ended, shaking his head.

Very, very complex indeed. When I woke up the first thing I saw was a shelf with a jar of honey sitting on it.

John, incidentally, was not clubbed over the head, as he had managed, he later told me, to slip the tall, thin woman who was following him. This maneuver had involved entering the restaurant where we had once had our turkey dinner, and leaving that restaurant by way of a window. Having slipped the woman, he had called their apartment and got her. We’re fine, she said. Where’s Deau? Shopping for dinner. And in a manner of speaking, that was true. Dinner was cooking, my dinner. I smelled onions and stewed apples at almost the same time I saw the shelf.

I don’t know when the two of them left. Perhaps, of course, they did not leave, and throughout the process were sitting among the shelves in the back room, some of which, no doubt, were still empty, having not, as yet, found objects for themselves.

Or sets of circumstances. E.g., the fact that I want to be the captain of a hot air balloon. Now. One could set that circumstance on a shelf.

Or of a dirigible. Although in that case there would be engines involved, and instruments. I’m not sure if instruments are needed on a hot air balloon. No doubt they are. Instruments and instructions. And charts. I will have to learn how to read charts. And to navigate at night. That could also be set on a shelf. Even the same shelf. Fragile objects that float at night with things and instruments in them.

Or just drift. A dirigible adrift. Of course, a dirigible adrift eventually explodes. I saw footage once — not pretty. Or a projectionist. Another shelf. That too. Projecting film, silent film, onto a white wall. Which is what I used to imagine I could do. See above. Back then.

But the story really is still out by the river where I really still was, looking down into the cold, slightly angry-looking water, figuring that, at least until circumstances might determine otherwise, I would keep some distance between it and myself.

Mine was a medium-sized not overly great-looking earnest-appearing individual. I stood on one end of a bridge, he stood on the other. I knew this one. He was one of the best and was going to be hard, if not impossible, to slip. Hello, I called across the bridge to him. He didn’t appear to hear me. I waved. He didn’t appear to see me. I began walking. He followed. It was quite an interesting relationship.

Off we went. Up the streets and down them and through doors and up escalators, I mean elevators, very small ones, but also I do mean escalators, or escalator, it is a rather funny word, as they all are, said over and over again.

It is possible, in this city, to cover distance underground. I did so. Through doors and down stairs. Corridors like snakes. Bright posters and glistening tile walls. People coming toward you in trickles and bursts.

Off in the distance, down one of the corridors, I heard music.

Voice and instrument.

Each after the other.

Gal I knew.

Hello, I said.

Part of the time she was one of us.

Right now, as far as I could tell, she was not.

She let go of her instrument, let it hang from a thick strap around her neck, and held out her hand.

You? she said, glancing down the long hall at him.

Yes, I said.

She nodded and started singing again so I dropped a coin into her hat and pushed off.

As I rounded the next corner and moved up toward the exit I heard another coin dropping, the other’s coin dropping, and the voice, which by the way was impossibly low and lovely, stopped.

Then I stopped.

Then it started again, with the instrument this time, and I started again, only, having started, found myself walking back the way I had come, so that, having re-rounded the corner, I was now walking behind him. He was not far ahead of me, and not moving fast, a nice easy pace, and his legs were shorter than mine and he looked a little, perhaps, round in the middle, and limped slightly, that was important, so that probably, conditions permitting, I would have him soon, I thought, only at that moment I passed her again and she nodded again and the music stopped.

She shrugged.

I dropped another coin.

He, in passing her again, after me again, did not.

So that was that and, back outside, we walked around like before until I was tired and sat down in an establishment where they served nice big drinks, one of which I sent over to him.

A few weeks before someone had sent one over to me.

I raised my glass.

He appeared not to notice. He appeared not to be drinking, either, but did, of course, and was.

I was trying to develop a plan.