The Impossibly by Laird Hunt Page A

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.
    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.