The Impossibly Read Online Free PDF Page B

a line of light was running along one of her forearms, and she was smiling.
    It was stupid, really stupid, all things considered, to have agreed to it, and then to have changed my mind. It was even stupider not to have thought to smooth it out. While not necessarily encouraged, a certain amount of noncompliance is admitted by the organization, and it would have been straightforward enough both to have failed to carry out my assignment and to have mitigated the significant recrimination I could now look forward to. Of course I had thought about it. There was an easy way. Much about the business is actually quite easy once you’ve been at it a while. I could have, for example, picked up the phone, or at the very least double-checked the address of the package I had dropped in the mail on my way back from telling them that I had changed my mind. But there is in me a small speck of something hard, something stubborn, something immensely intractable, and I didn’t.
    There, in the center of the cigar smoke, she had used the word “important,” and I was to think of that word a little later, as I sat there, thinking of preposterous causalities and staring at those shelves.
    That afternoon the four of us drove away. We had been to the city I had suggested. Now we were going to the country.

WE QUICKLY FOUND EXCELLENT LODGINGS. The old house, in which no one else was staying, had huge rooms, high ceilings, wide hallways, and one or two windowless staircases in addition to the regular one. I did not like these windowless staircases and generally avoided them. Once, though, late at night, in fact the last night, I woke and strayed and met an old man on one of the staircases, an old man I will more properly introduce later, who stood in what should have been absolute dark with what seemed to be a pale light falling onto and around him, and who said to me, listen, listen to what I have to say just a little more. Also, there were a rather unusual number of toilets in the house, some of them small and inexplicably dark even with the lights on, and one night walking by one of them I thought I heard someone praying, or at any rate mumbling rhythmically, on the other side of the door. The house did not have a garden, or rather had for its garden the whole countryside, so that lithe, dark trees seemed always to be waving in a soft evening wind. Our room, on the sunny side of the house, had a yellow door, a silver door handle, a pale blue dresser, darker yellow walls, white moldings, three large windows, those translucent curtains, dark green shutters, a washbasin, a hardwood floor that creaked in four spots, two lamps, two small tables, a silver candelabra, a long mirror slightly cracked in the top left corner, a desk with two drawers, two round floor rugs, a wastepaper basket, a vase that contained a quantity of dried flowers varied in shape and color and tone, one comfortable chair, one desk chair, a faded print in a chipped gilt frame that showed the proceedings of a circus, a huge bed with curtains hung around it, and two very slow old flies buzzing lowly. The circus. John, it seems to me, at some point had something to say about the circus, but about the gladiator-stick-you-with-large-forks-style one, about some place one could visit where the old fork-style circuses had been held. This gladiator business has always seemed improbable to me. Once, as a boy, I put on a suit of plastic armor and took up a plastic lance or sword or club and was pummeled by my friends. That pummeling ended what had been a long-standing interest in the glory, not to mention effectiveness, of knights and their shining armor, and probably preempted any interest I might later have developed in gladiators. Anyway, I prefer the regular kind of circus, she said. As, I said, do I. What was the best thing you ever saw in the circus? I told her about an elephant. And also about some fleas. We both liked fleas. And clowns. Soon our room contained other things, some of