The Impossibly Read Online Free Page A

tall, skinny woman wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat came up to me and whispered, marry the crown, pass it on.
    I passed it on to John.
    John said, I just did, and grinned.
    The room was crowded.
    The crowded room spun around me.
    Anyway, the first time she saw my apartment there were upwards of a hundred people in it. I exaggerate. But there were many, perhaps too many. Or at least this is how I put it to myself, because after a time, without telling me, she left.
    I am an awful drunk. If I am not much present at the best of times, when I am drunk I devolve into something I think it would not be unfair to characterize as vaguely reptilian. I sit and sit and occasionally my eyes move. The last time I had been drunk—I mean before I got very drunk at the event and retracted, like something that might be happiest under a heat bulb, into a corner—I had been drunk in the presence, to speak euphemistically, of someone I was supposed to have been watching. I was supposed to have been watching him in case he chose at that late stage to say anything, but instead I sat on the floor behind him and took small sips from a large bottle I had been left with and got drunk, and when he did say something, in a very small voice, I said nothing, and alerted no one, and I stared at the back of his head, and drank, and after a time announced to myself that I no longer noticed the smell.
    The day of the event was very sunny and then it was very rainy, and I was outside, attending to a few last details, in that rainy part of it.
    It was not nice, this rain. It was a cold, thorough, ruin-your-fucking-universe kind of rain and I cringed each time great splashes of it hit my face.
    It is unlovely to repeatedly cringe in public, and I found myself saying to myself, quit it.
    Others heard me.
    In fact, one person who heard me said, excuse me, and we struck up a conversation. It was not, to tell the truth, much of a conversation. Sometimes, I am capable of striking up successful conversations with complete strangers. Once, John watched me sit down at a table with someone in a crowded restaurant and talk until that other person, quite some time later, stood up to go. This incident greatly astonished John, who, though subjected during that period to my nightly outpourings, had never once before seen me address more than four or five words to anyone besides him. In fact, one time as the two of us stood at a counter with two acquaintances of the more pleasantly gendered persuasion, John described my almost total silence, as we stood there, as a condition—a condition I struggled with, gallantly. And I must say I frequently find myself returning, when I reflect on the varying success of my interactions, to the notion that I am struggling with some sort of condition.
    I must be.
    It is as if part of me falls into some great dark pit, though always only part of me.
    Incidentally, this conversation I was having was with someone wearing large, reflective sunglasses.
    Someone, I note again, who was tall and thin.
    These are all details.
    I am made nervous by events.
    Strange things happen at them.
    I took up a position in the kitchen. Then by the window. Then by my bed, for a moment, then by the door.
    Finally, they arrived.
    Hello, said Deau, very roundly breezing past me.
    Hello, she said.
    I brought her a drink and a plate of pickles and meats.
    You have to meet John, I said.
    Kiss me, she said.
    It was quite an event. To his credit, John had managed to dig up a huge number of participants. I brought up the subject of John’s excellent technique and pointed over toward him. John, cleaned up now, was spinning around in the center of a small group with one of my pillows on his head. We stood there by the door, each drinking what I had brought over and nibbling on the pickles and meats. Comfortable. In fact, wonderful. But she didn’t stay long.
    Later the next week, she said to me, after a certain point, and it is a very clear point, I cannot tolerate