The Impossibly Read Online Free Page B

The Impossibly
Book: The Impossibly Read Online Free
Author: Laird Hunt
Tags: Fiction, Literary
Pages:
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events, and that is why I left, but it was very nice to see your apartment and to meet John.
    That’s fine absolutely anything is fine, I said.
    I did not actually see them meet, but at one point John came over to me and said, okay, wow, then he went over to the kitchen, and a little after that is when he spilled wine on Deau, or vice-versa, and they laughed, and the two of them made the plan that the four of us should go away somewhere, perhaps to the country.
    Given the circumstances, it was a wonderful trip.
    There is always this question of circumstances.
    Just before she left the event, for example, we kissed, right next to the table where I had piled the food, which had, by this time, been thoroughly massacred. We kissed and kissed, and when we were finished she explained to me that part of the point of her initiating the kiss, at that moment, had been that she was about to leave, and that insofar as she had imagined the event before arriving, that imagining had involved a kiss, any kind of kiss at any moment involving me, and that the earlier kiss by the door when she arrived had been nice but insufficient, and that was the reason for it, if it needed a reason, and she was happy, even if she had not stayed long, that she had come.
    Yes, I said.
    Yes, I said again.
    Yes.
    John rented a car and the four of us drove off toward the country.
    On the drive the two of us fell easily into the habit of discussing objects and words. John and Deau did not participate in our discussions and did not appear, at any point, to have any interest in doing so, but that didn’t bother us, and as we stopped along the way, we made several acquisitions, which would appear, later, on her shelves.
    It was an excellent drive.
    I did, however, of course, still harbor one or two creeping fears, but I was not cringing, and there was no rain, it was sunny, the event was over, and I was the better for it. Speaking, however, about rain—the rain that day of the event. At the end of our lame conversation the tall, thin individual I was talking to invited me, quite firmly, to enter a nearby building and go upstairs.
    I do not know why I said yes to what they asked me to do when I got upstairs, I did not have to say yes, that had always been part of our agreement, but I did.
    That I had said yes was why I said to John, a couple of days after the event when we were recovered and were discussing travel plans, let’s go here.
    Why? said John.
    I’ve heard it’s beautiful, I said.
    John has never approved of my engagement with this world, a world for which he has always found me, rightly I suppose, ill-suited. Quite a number of years before, in fact, he had helped me to get started in another line, one that for various reasons I did not pursue.
    But we did go where I proposed because my lie, this particular lie at any rate, was not, or so I then thought, detected.
    Of course I knew you were lying, John later said.
    That week, before our trip to the country, I slept beautifully.
    And then we were driving up to the tops of the low round hills that occur on that drive and down them.
    At one point, as we had stopped the car at the top of one of these hills and were looking out over a vista of undulations, in the direction of the ocean, Deau announced that her tour had now begun, and that she was ecstatic that we were all with her, so at our next stop in a little town we toasted the beginning of her tour with a glass of wine, then lightly burned our mouths on some delicious stewed apples. Deau and John had a certain level of unusual gourmandise in common. It was Deau, for example, who had insisted we order the stewed apples. And this had endlessly charmed John, who had insisted the meal before that we select only the most colorful dishes available—borscht, pomegranate, horned melon, and candied plums.
    Stewed apples was, we agreed, an excellent word and concept, and before leaving the restaurant we acquired a handsome jar of it. So you can see that it was

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