I have killed someone.
Who?
There, on the ground.
Who is it?
My boss.
Which boss?
(No answer.)
Why?
Because of a stapler, because of a shovel and a dark woods, because she was about to have me killed, because …
I was in love once. Or perhaps twice — in a park, and then again on a couch.
The wind and scattered clouds and pigeons, soothing us.
But to return …
Yes?
To what you did.
They were waiting for me. Three of them in my apartment. My boss set me up. I escaped. Went down the back stairs into the alley. My boss was waiting there for them to finish.
So you killed her?
Yes.
With the shovel?
It was still in my hand. I’d been using it in the woods.
Using it for what?
To dig.
To dig what?
(No answer.)
And then they shot you?
A flesh wound, in the neck. Then when they found me again they broke my legs.
Such were the thoughts I had, more or less, as I lay there on the tracks and afterward, and that I have just had again, though of course they must be somewhat different. In fact, given my condition at the time and my condition now, not to mention the considerable interval, it would be irresponsible not to admit the possibility that these memories were inaccurate, i.e., that they did not substantially adhere to the real, or at least to some satisfactory approximation thereof. I learned quite early on (in the bedroom, in the fields) to content myself with approximations and have long taken comfort in them.
Taken comfort.
One comes to whisper that.
At any rate, to resume, it was the thought that I had been in love with someone, this perplexing and galvanizing premise, that caused me at last, as I remember it, the pain in my neck notwithstanding, to stir and, eventually, one or two more trains having passed through me, to stand.
Then I walked along the tracks, through dark tunnels lit occasionally by train lights and yellow soot-covered lanterns. Every few hundred yards the tunnels opened onto platforms where people, collapsed into chairs, slumped against walls, leaning on painted girders, waited in a kind of daze. They were strangely attractive to me these people waiting for trains below the earth, and once or twice as I walked I stopped and considered them. Mostly though I walked, and walked and walked, and stopped walking and rested with my cold feet in a puddle that held some special appeal for the rats. The rats, intent upon their puddle, which probably had a little oil or meat or rotten lettuce in it, paid me very little attention, although one or two of them attempted, in desultory fashion, and with no luck at all, to bite my ankles.
The city, I then discovered, was as intricately articulated below its surface as it was above, and it was not at all unpleasant to walk along, at best a pale blur, and think about love. Or about being in love. At first it troubled me greatly that I couldn’t recall any further details, and that, in fact, some of what I was sure I had just remembered, had already slipped my mind. But this feeling passed quickly enough.
I love you, I said, and the words both warmed and chilled me, as if they were some strange food or drug, or the last faint traces of a dream. I walked and walked and the words “hand in hand” accompanied me, as did the words “I love” so that after a time, when I began to rise up off the tracks, through the damp ceiling and back onto the dark streets, I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised when, still walking, still wrapped in similar thoughts, my mouth making the shape of similar words, I floated up the sides of several buildings and, once, a water tower, where, as the cold wind blew both through and around me, I could just make out the gray-blue light of the approaching dawn.
Green Metal Door (the lost chapter from the original Impossibly)
And as I went upon my way I was slightly glad that I had met him. A droll customer.
THIS OCCURRED QUITE SOME TIME AGO, LONG before the events I have set down elsewhere, long before, at any rate, most of them. During that period I was working, principally, in a firm of transaction specialists. I say “principally” because, at the suggestion of a colleague, I had taken on some outside work as an investigator of sorts, setting up shop, as I did so, in an office on the fourth floor of a building on the far side of town. It was not, at the beginning, particularly nice, this office. It was unsettlingly run-down, with cracked paint and exposed pipes and stacks of newspapers and a huge green sofa with a large stain on one of its arms, and it looked out onto a courtyard into which, clearly, several decades of garbage had been dumped. Still, even though at the beginning it wasn’t nice, it did have a sort of anteroom where illustrations could be hung and clients could wait and where a secretary, this was the best part of all, could sit, and it had two of those terrific semitransparent plateglass doors. Once I was settled, I would stand, in fact, for considerable periods of time beside those doors — one leading out into the corridor, the other mediating between my office and the waiting room — considering, as a part of my self-imposed and, admittedly, desultory training, any number of deductive intricacies.
Often, as I stood there, my secretary would bring me small snacks.
Yo, Boss, here’s another snack, he would say.
In short, I had great hopes.
The above-mentioned colleague from the transactions firm helped me rent the office.
Sport, he said. This has got to be the place.
It was. I sat down. I stood. I went over and looked at my secretary. He looked at me. I had not seen his teeth when I engaged him. I went back and sat down. Several days went by like this, exactly like this. Then one afternoon there was a knock on the door.
Send him/her in, I said.
Incidentally, when I speak of several days, I am not referring to consecutive days. Most of my time, of course, was still spent at the transactions firm or in the field, which should be taken to mean any place — dock or alley or social club — where business was conducted outside the firm’s premises. The night before the afternoon of the knock on the door — there is someone knocking, Boss, my secretary excitedly said — I had been in all of those places, variously in company and alone, and have to confess that, as the events I propose to relate began, I was feeling somewhat the worse for wear, somewhat tired, not quite right. I was thinking of just that when my secretary put his head through the door of my office and said, there is someone knocking, and I said, so answer it.
The individual who came into my office and stood before me looked vaguely familiar. She had long blond hair that did a lot with the dim, yellow light dripping down from the ceiling, and she was wearing a brown trench coat that didn’t do much to hide her attributes, of which, let me tell you, there were plenty.
Evening, she said.
Evening? I thought. I looked at my watch. It was evening, well into it. I had been under the impression, as I indicated above, that we were still dealing with the afternoon.
Come in, sit down, I said. But looking up, I saw that she had already come in, had already sat down. Clearly, something was off. I was off. I made a note to myself to get friendly with some food and take a break.
I still have that note. It is written in that extraordinarily faint, barely determined hand, that was to characterize all of my attempts at note-taking over the coming days and weeks, and that was to contribute, increasingly, along with other factors, to my inability to make consistent sense of the evidence that was put before me.