The Impossibly (22 page)

For my part, having left aside for a moment the bosoms and bludgeonings I had been preoccupied with, as soon as we began to walk through the rows of ancient transformers, I thought of travel in deep space, and of a newly described propulsion system in which a spacecraft would generate a plasma field that would effectively function as a sail to harness the cosmic winds. It seemed to me that the majestically derelict machinery surrounding us, including the gutted turbine where the body was, must once have had something in common with the proposed plasma generator, which might someday lead us to strange and distant parts. It was along these and tangential lines (and not of decay) that I thought as we lifted the body wrapped in black plastic and deposited it in the oversize bag we had brought with us.

The individual who had let us in let us out through another door. This individual had been silent throughout our visit and seemed not at all predisposed to engage in the kind of banter that is often characteristic of these assignments. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he too had been struck by our surroundings and was engaged in musings of his own as he led us through the all but dark. (I asked him about this when some days later I had the opportunity to converse with him. He told me that he had thought of nothing, that when he was working he did not think, but that he liked the idea of decay, especially insofar as it applied to himself. How do you feel about plasma-based propulsion systems? I asked him. Why? Because that’s what I was thinking about while we were there. Sorry, but I don’t care too much about that.) Still, as we left, John, who at the opening of the door found, he later told me, a sense of levity returning, made a remark regarding the quality and prodigious size of our colleague’s external accoutrements, which elicited the beginnings of a smile from the individual. This beginning of a smile, in its turn, when we had stepped out through a green metal door and into the dark alley beyond it, reminded me of something (see above—my first case, a certain set of minutes unaccounted for).

Are you missing part of one of your teeth, the right incisor? I asked him as he was preparing to shut the door.

Yes, he said. And as he said it, perhaps in a moment of empathy for the body we had in the bag, I found myself drifting back through the dark equipment to lie for a moment in the open turbine. Before long though I found myself back with John, walking along one dark street after another as we made our way to the river. We were discussing our thoughts on the interior of the power station and also the desirability of live/work spaces. Neither one of us had ever lived in a loft and we agreed that the prospect of so much renovated space had its appeal. My apartment at that time was a renovated space. It had once been the office of a fairly successful tailor who had returned, the housing agent had told me, to another country to die. When I moved in there were some scraps of cloth and thread on the floor behind the radiators, and in one of the closets I found a needle and a pin. Later, when John moved in with me and we became roommates, we found a bolt of blue cloth beneath one of the floorboards, and John had shirts made for each of us. This was not long after the events I am currently attempting to give some account of, that is to say after the conclusion of the present case and my retirement from the investigation business. This was not a happy moment, as you might imagine, but it seemed a necessary one. Now, of course, all these years later, I see how things might have been different for me if my speculations had been more probing and if my conclusions had been more prescient and if certain events had not unfolded as they did.

They did.

We reached the river.

John said, wait here, swung the bag up over his shoulder and walked off into the gloom.

But instead of waiting for him, as our briefing note directed, by the crates of rotten carrots, beets, and yellow squash that lined the walls of the warehouses we were now behind, it occurred to me that without actually doing so, or at any rate seeming to, I might in fact follow him, or try. I took this decision in an attempt to consciously effect the phenomenon that had lately, and as recently as the turbine, afflicted me, in light of the considerable amount of advice my earlier visitor had imparted to me, and not just concerning my pulse.

It worked. I walked beside John, I walked behind him, I walked in front.

There are other things you can do, she had told me. And if, as you say, you are currently engaged in a potential homicide case, you will find some of the modalities of your condition quite useful.

This seemed useful. John, instead of taking the bag to the river and dropping it over the side, simply, in walking, leaned his shoulder into one of the ubiquitous crates by the water’s edge, causing it to fall into the dark water (a sound I would later remember having heard as I stood waiting by the warehouse for John), while he continued on a little farther, at which point he was met by a certain individual, difficult to make out in the half dark, until he smiled and showed his cracked incisor. There followed both an exchange of words and of knowing expressions, and also of the bag, which the individual hefted onto his own shoulder and set off with. Pushing my luck a little further, I followed along with this individual as he made his way back through the crates and into an alley not far from where I stood waiting and where John would momentarily rejoin me.

We walked through the same set of alleys John and I had negotiated in carrying the body to the docks and, before long (it was necessary to be impressed by this individual’s robustness) we were back at the green door, where, instead of following the individual into the machines and the dark, I began, light as one of the lesser elements, to float up the side of the building into the night sky.

One will be sure to think it possible, even necessary, to draw certain conclusions from this episode, and I was subsequently both willing and almost eager to do so.

1) Necessarily, for instance, something was afoot; 2) That something involved me; 3) As well as the case I was working on; 4) Possibly; 5) John had something to do with it; 6) The transactions firm had something to do with it; 7) I was a ghost.

This possibility had been presented to me by my earlier visitor, herself, she alleged, a ghost.

What do you mean you’re a ghost?

I’m a ghost, I’m dead, I do things.

And yet here you are.

But then she wasn’t.

Suddenly she was standing behind me.

She put her hands over my eyes.

It was possible to see through them a little.

All this means, I said, gesturing with my drink, is that I’ve been feeling a little unusual lately. I see through your hands because I’m so sleepy. I’ve been working two jobs and keeping some pretty strange hours and talking to some pretty strange customers and doing some pretty ugly things. Likely, you’re not even here.

I’m not, she said. Which is to say that I am and am not. I’m also elsewhere.

Where?

I don’t know.

But you’ve floated over here to inform me that I’m a ghost.

I didn’t float. I try not to. Voluntary use of such capacities tends to over determine them, makes it difficult to get back.

What do you mean by “get back”?

To my body.

So you
do
know where it is.

No, I don’t. All I know is it’s dark—or that my eyes don’t work. Which is a possibility. It happens in a pretty high percentage of cases.

And how did you learn all this?

There is literature available.

Literature?

Yes.

Listen, I said, I appreciate the scotch and you and your weird small hands and legs, but I have to get to work. I’ve just been having some mediocre out-of-body experiences, which a couple of pounds of food and some sleep will remedy.

You won’t sleep, she said.

I have to go, I said.

But we sat and drank and she said other things.

8) She said it was akin, at times, to a dream state, that at times I would like it, that at times I would not.

Can I walk through walls? I said.

Haven’t you already?

I thought about that.

And also, she said, barely there, you are divisible—can be barely there in more than one place, send off slivers of yourself. Then there are mirrors.

What about them?

A ghost sees many things in a mirror, but never him/herself.

So how come just after I got my bruise I could see myself in the mirror in my office?

It takes time for the condition to fully assert itself. Try it now.

I stood. In the mirror hanging behind the couch on the wall I saw a row of brightly colored computers, a mummified crocodile, a shotgun, a row of turnips, a display of ray guns.

What do you see? I said.

Two galaxies in the constellation Canis Major colliding, she said.

9) She also said that the visions or hallucinations I had been having could be both useful and dangerous—useful because any accurate edge on upcoming particularities was helpful; dangerous because as often as not what felt like an accurate edge was apocryphal or too vague to do anything but fuel confusion.

So how can I tell the difference?

You can’t. At least not until afterwards. Maybe not even then.

Well, that’s just great. Doesn’t the literature you mentioned have anything to say about it?

She nodded. It says what I just said.

Can you add anything—like maybe from your own experience?

I’m an optimist, she said.

Meaning what?

She shrugged. Meaning I think it’s all going to work out. Some way or other.

I took a sip of scotch and thought about it. I didn’t know what to think.

At any rate, before I knew it I was no longer floating up above the buildings and warehouses, but walking back to the firm with John and discussing all manner of first-rate subjects.

John was very interested, he told me as we walked along, in the subject of big cats in general, and of cheetahs specifically. He had been doing some research lately and had learned that cheetahs, while well deserving of the title “fastest land animal,” were at a considerable disadvantage when it came to weight and strength, and often lost prey. Lions, who were in many ways the scourge of the jungle, and also of the savannah, were always delighted to come across a cheetah working over a fresh kill, as there was nothing easier for a lion than to send a cheetah packing. John had never yet seen either a lion or a cheetah, but he had seen a jackal once. The little dog, as John described it, had snapped viciously at a stick John was carrying before running away.

Jackals live in dens, John told me.

Like badgers, I said.

Yeah, just like badgers, Sport.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I might well in the face of this benign but interesting conversation have come around to being convinced of the apocryphal nature of my surreptitious tailing, had not one subsequent remark struck a jarring note. After we had concluded our interaction regarding cats, jackals, and more or less related categories of animals, John said, that was some hat that guy was wearing.

What hat? I said.

Never mind, he said.

That was all there was to it. But little by little, as I sat in my office later, after my leave of absence had started, I began to consider the events that had occurred while part of me had waited for John by the warehouse. One of the things I remembered was that, unlike earlier, the individual with the cracked tooth had been wearing an orange hat, a hat that John had remarked on as they stood bantering a moment before exchanging the bag.

My secretary buzzed. I buzzed back. The first of the appointments he had set up for me came in.

This was Ms. Krumpacher—a very pleasant and intelligent individual who had, you will remember, information relevant to the case. When she had gone, Mr. Jones came. Then Ms. Green.

Ms. Green, I was somewhat surprised to note, was more or less the woman I had shared scotch with the previous evening. We had a nice chat. Then she left. After I had seen her out, I returned to my desk, hit the intercom, told my secretary to hold all calls and to tell any visitors I wasn’t in.

Sure, Boss, said my secretary.

Good, I said. Incidentally, how have you been?

Not so bad, Boss, he said. A little lonely, but not so bad.

We all get lonely, I said.

Sure, Boss. Will that be all?

Yes. Although, frankly, I’d rather you didn’t call me Boss.

What would you like me to call you?

Sir.

I won’t call you Sir.

Then don’t call me anything.

Having concluded that exchange, I leaned back in my chair and set my mind to the task of digesting the information I had just received from Ms. Krumpacher, Mr. Jones, and Ms. Green. Despite my best efforts at concentrating, however, I found that my thoughts kept returning to my secretary’s remark about loneliness. No doubt it was this remark that brought to my mind images of all those days I spent alone as a teenager in the large farmhouse or out in the surrounding fields. I would lie in bed in the dark and look at the rectangle of light the service lamp projected onto the ceiling above my bed. It seemed to me, as I lay there looking at it, that the world had at last been reduced, that its substance had been siphoned away, that all that was left was this pale rectangle, which, in its turn, would surely fade. In the fields, in the early morning, I would walk and hum and throw stones and think, there where they have fallen, that is where I will lie. And much else along these lines, so that after a certain interval I found myself moved to rise, to go into the front room and join my secretary, to sit, as it were, in company with him. This laudable ambition notwithstanding, I got no farther than the handle of the door to the front room. My secretary wasn’t alone. He was conversing, in a suspicious whisper, with the aforementioned individual with the cracked tooth.

Yes, he’s in there, and feeling very lonely, my secretary said.

So maybe I’ll go in there and give him some company, the individual with the cracked tooth said. And when he stood (the door was slightly ajar) I could see he was holding a gun.