The Impossibly Read Online Free PDF Page A

all going along very well.
    At that business meeting on that rainy day it was like this. I had never before met the woman I met that day and she was persuasive, strangely. I had met many other women and not-women in the course of my career, but not this one. She was one of the ones I had heard about, or perhaps the only one, it’s difficult to say.
    I think, probably, it was more than just her—that behind her, so to speak, were other women and not-women, with other cigars, in other rooms, who had other perhaps more important individuals than me doing projects for them. I do not of course mean to imply that if the woman with the cigar had superiors, or even just partners, that they were all smoking cigars and wearing gloves, etc.
    This seems unlikely. Boss types, it has been my experience, all have their own special stamp. In my previous place of residence, for example, I had worked for a person who had in his office a very complex model train system that was always in operation, at every meeting and otherwise.
    The organization that I was currently working for, by the way, was reputed to be immense and immensely effective, although largely staffed by part-timers like myself.
    Probably not much like myself.
    Or only maybe.
    At any rate, the woman with the cigar who I was standing in front of was definitely a boss. Perhaps there were more-unnerving-to-look-at bosses, perhaps there were not. Once, I had been told, someone at a meeting had seen an eyeball set on top of the model smokestack on the model train in my former boss’s office, but there are many such stories, actually.
    She sat there smoking the cigar, which is an endless thing in a meeting, never finished, and I was standing in front of her, and I could see myself reflected in miniature in her sunglasses, and it was a small room.
    Yes I’ll do it, I said.
    Also, however, she had a stutter, quite an intense one, and sometimes into the center of the stutter she would insert the cigar, and, the story of the eyeball on the model smokestack notwithstanding, I still have not seen or heard of anything quite as impressive as that.
    This is all about why I said yes.
    You’ll find I have precious little to say later about why I changed my mind.
    What? I said.
    She was speaking to me, not in the car anymore, we had left the car and were now, the four of us, installed in a hotel in a small city on the coast, and the two of us were in our room, and she had been speaking to me. Here is what she said:
    It is not the objects, not the objects at all. It is not the words either, although often they are lovely and the contrasts are surprising when you have one in your head shaped like a rectangle and then you have another in your head shaped like a square, for example. That is lovely, as is the sound of your voice saying them, when you say them, but it is not the fact of the objects or the fact of the words, really, it is the fact of establishing the correct establishments on which to place them, that is all.
    Each uncombined expression can mean one of these, she said, i.e., what, how large, what kind, related to what, where, when, how placed, in what state, acting, or suffering. See? For example, a woman may be five-foot six and a writer, a student of philosophy at her desk at midnight, sitting down and writing, and suffering from the cold.
    Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection, she said.
    I can’t do it, of course. I can’t say, again, what she said, not ever, not exactly. It is all there, inside me, is what I mean, but I can’t say it, not even for myself. It seems tragic that in matters of the heart one should have to suffer, even in discourse with one’s self, from this sort of aphasia.
    Lately, for example, I have been thinking of an instance in which, to say it in general terms, she came across the room toward me, and even though it was considerably more than this, it is only in these general terms that I am ever able