The Impossibly Read Online Free PDF

to say it.
    She came across the room toward me.
    It was too many shelves, at the end of it. It was a hell of shelves. From where I sat that day, I kept losing count of them. Over and over I would count and then lose count, and then begin again.
    The next morning the four of us set out to visit the city. John and Deau were already walking with incredible synchronicity, and it was agreeable to follow them up the steps of that building and under the arches of this. She looks happy, she said. John’s happy too, I said. Old men limped along pulling carts and young women went by on scooters. We stopped at a flower shop where I bought her a daisy and a tulip and a rose and a carnation and a sunflower and a narcissus and a gladiolus and a lily and a tulip and a sunflower and a ranunculus and she said, they’re lovely, thank you. In one place, we drank tea poured from above the server’s head, and in another we ate fresh-made ice cream mashed green with pistachio nuts. Sometimes John would drop back and take my arm, and sometimes she would walk ahead and disappear with Deau. Once they disappeared for quite some time, and John and I sat down before steaming bowls at a table under a hideous bluish candelabra in a warm room that smelled of cinnamon and saffron, and, very powerfully, of what we were told was goat.
    John, I said.
    Tell all, he said.
    Nothing.
    We sat and sat and took care of another round of steaming bowls and talked. John talked about Deau and I talked about her and found I didn’t really have much to say. Then we paid and left and found them sometime later wearing completely different clothes.
    Actually, they found us. Sitting on the terrace of another establishment sipping yellow drinks and watching old men play a game with shiny steel balls.
    It was then that we walked down through the gently sloping streets of the warm city and saw the pair of monkeys, which made all of us, but especially her, and I do not know why especially her, laugh.
    Then we slept.
    I woke.
    You were shaking, she said.
    I was shouting? I said.
    Shaking, you were shaking, you are shaking, stop.
    I did stop, gradually, and then it was the second day in the small breeze-swept city on the coast.
    I have changed my mind.
    The personage sitting across the table from me, at a table with a view of the ocean and several rooftops belonging to the coastal city, did not blink, did not move, in fact never moved, not once, and after I had repeated myself twice more I left.
    Nobody interfered with me as I walked out, which is unusual. Part of me, to tell the truth, had been hoping for a little immediate interference, which is quite standard and would likely have encouraged me to undertake a course of action that could have significantly minimized the interference that followed.
    I thought of the woman with the cigar and of the cigar inserted into the center of her stutter all the way back to the hotel where they were sleeping in.
    I thought, also, of an old man I once saw smoking a small homemade cigar through a hole in his throat and how that man had only had one eye and something very wrong with one arm.
    That place was far away from anywhere anybody has ever known me.
    And I think that soon, very soon, I will go away, to such a place, to stay. Even if once I arrive I find myself obliged to sit in close quarters with just such an old man, smoking, in just such fashion, etc.
    Which is to say that, getting ahead of myself again, if you have never smelled it, then you should never have to smell it—the smell, I mean, of burning flesh.
    She was not sleeping in. She was sitting up in bed and looking across the room to the window, which had a view much like the one I had seen from the room I had just left. Here, however, there was a certain amount of that fine winter light that comes into such rooms at such times in such parts of the world, and it was falling across her knees and her bare arms wrapped around her knees, which were pulled close to her chest, and