Laird Hunt: The Impossibly

WHEN THE FOLKS AT COFFEE HOUSE PRESS asked if I would write an introduction to Laird Hunt’s first novel, The Impossibly, I said yes. I said yes without thinking. I almost always say no to such requests. But I could not say no. I have always loved this novel. How could I say no to writing an introduction to a spy novel that opens with a sentence about a stapler? But more, the sentence is about the word stapler . This is a novel about appearances, reality and shadow, identity and anonymity, words and their corresponding signifieds, or the echoes of those signifieds. The Impossibly is like Beckett’s Molloy, but faster paced, better to dance to. It is like Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, but so much funnier.

The Impossibly takes a kind of psychic snapshot of the soul of someone who must move through shadows, whose job it is to move through shadows, whose choice it is to do so. Reality for this unnamed operative is like a phantom limb, the limb having been severed from him long ago, but the sense of it, the weight of it, the aura of it remains, with all its paresthesias, transient aches, and the pain that resided in the part before its loss. Much as an operative in this dark and murky world must float away from his past and his identity, so the novel drifts away from what pretends to be coherence and sense. This work is about meaning, about words, and about the so-called uselessness of the reality and the appearance of that reality in regard to these words. The prose mirrors what must be the fragmented sense of self and being that someone so removed from his real life must experience. And if one can, named or unnamed, veer so far away from what was at some time understood and perceived to be reality, then what are we to make of any perception of reality? What is real? When is reality real?

Our nameless operative has failed at something, we don’t know what. His mission? His understanding of the mission? His mere understanding of his own presence and purpose? Everyone in his sphere appears to be involved in his desired, needed absolution, and in his punishment, but are they? Are they even aware of his botched efforts? We comprehend the paranoid behavior, recognize the music of it, the rhythm of it. And the fear is palpable as the operative realizes that he has been assigned an assassin. But is there an assassin at all? The confusion is what is beautiful, for its clarity, for its logic. I could describe the story fifteen different ways and I cannot describe it at all.

Strange, beautiful, strange, complicated, strange. To call The Impossibly surreal is to miss the point. It is hyperréalisme, its roots more in the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard than André Breton.

Who will kill us in the end? And will it matter?

Percival Everett

Los Angeles, California

February 2011

THE FIRST TIME WE MET IT WAS ABOUT A STAPLER, I think. I knew the word, and she didn’t, so I stepped forward, slightly, and said it. The shopkeeper smiled, and she smiled, and the shopkeeper reached under the counter and produced a box. It was a fine box, smooth white on the outside, dark corrugated brown on the inside, and contained a nice-enough looking gray stapler that the shopkeeper demonstrated, first opening the mechanism and loading it with a generous strip of his own staples, then closing it on two sheets of a yellow ledger. He pulled lightly on the two sheets to demonstrate that they would not, if not pulled on too strenuously, come apart, stressing, as he did so, that no stapler could be expected to perform satisfactorily given unsuitable material. He then asked if the stapler would be used for heavy or light jobs, and, as the answer was both, put two small maroon boxes of staples on the counter, and asked if there would be anything else.

At this point I wandered off.

Though not far.

A moment later I was asked to come over again.

Hole puncher, I said.

The shopkeeper said he was very sorry, but that item was currently out of stock.

When we had left, she asked me to repeat each of the words I had used in the shop, which I did, then she asked me to repeat each of them again more slowly, which I also did, then she took out a pen and a small notepad and had me write each of the words down, which process I found quite hypnotic. As I did not write either of the words very neatly, she took back the pen and the notepad and very carefully closed one or two of my vowels. She then put away the pen and the notepad. Not quite sure what to say, I told her I thought she’d gotten a bargain, which wasn’t true, and she told me, though smiling pleasantly, that she thought she’d been ripped off. That seeming to have been that, I started to walk away. But then she called me back. There were three other words she had been unable to come up with in her wanderings that day, and she wondered if I could spell them out if I knew them, so that she could write them down. Two of the words I did know, and one of them I did not, and then, with something only slightly different on my face, I did walk away.

In those days I was in the middle of two or three things that seemed to take up unnecessarily large amounts of my time, but of course there was no getting around them. One of these things was setting in motion the acquisition of a certain item, which was proving to be very difficult to obtain. Another was the process of establishing whether or not the poorly functioning washer / dryer in my apartment was under warranty, etc. I was told there were papers. I knew there were papers, but where were the papers? Then in the middle of the night, literally in the middle of the night, I knew. I told the man on the phone that the papers — behind the washer / dryer on the floor when the leak had occurred — had become wet and then damp, and were now, although I had more or less dried them out, very much stuck together. There was a silence on the other end of the line, then I was told that I would have to bring the papers to the shop where they could be deciphered, and where, I might add, once I had put the crumpled mess in front of him, they were not.

So there was this and one or two other amazingly similar though of course really quite different things I was involved with at that time, or at least involved with part of that time. Part of that time I was involved with nothing, a nothing that mainly consisted of lying on the floor staring at the ceiling.

The ceiling was new to me.

As was the floor.

I kept, also, becoming confused about the placement of the windows, and bumping my shoulders on bits of unexpected masonry, and waking up in the morning or in the middle of the night scared.

Though this has never, in my case, been unusual.

But also from the floor, you could hear the river. I had seen the river. It was not as big a river as I was used to, nor, however, was it as small as I had been advised to expect. I had not expected anything at all as regarded the number and variety of bridges, and so, in my wanderings, had been consistently, pleasantly, surprised.