Free The Impossibly by Laird Hunt Page A

onto them some kind of epilogue, this one, the end I say, does not.



Now, instead of encountering a different set of strangers, we encountered the same ones, and this familiarity comforted us to no end.
    —PAMELA LU
    Pamela: A Novel

B UT THEN ONE MORNING I THOUGHT I saw her again. I was walking along a street near my apartment carrying a bag that contained three warm pastries or, rather, two and one-half warm pastries—I had already started eating one of them. It had a light, sweet glaze that would have gone well with steamed milk, and I was vaguely touching the tip of my tongue to the center of my upper lip and feeling very happy, thoroughly contented, perhaps even a little smug, when I saw her again, or thought I did. She was standing quite near me on a corner, looking in the direction of a man coming rapidly across the street toward her. The man was wearing a hat with a wide rim and sunglasses, as, I might add, was she. The man approached and kept approaching and then, although his speed broke for a moment, had passed her and continued along the street, and she turned and stood looking toward me, or seemed to be. I greeted her. She didn’t respond. She did, however, continue to seem to look at me, so I approached and said, would you like a pastry? They’re very good. How true: in addition to being finely glazed, these pastries contained a fresh pear filling blended with an almond paste and one could smell this aspect of their preparation even through the bag. When she didn’t respond I leaned forward a little and asked her if she wanted to smell the bag. Good God, she said. It was a bright, warm day in early summer, and there were birds in the trees and on the cars and on the building fronts, very pretty birds. I tried to come up with something to say about the birds but couldn’t, so instead I complimented her on the shorts she was wearing. Thank you, she said. This seemed more promising. After a moment, however, it occurred to me that she might just as well have complimented me, in return, on mine, as I had just purchased them the previous day in a store we had once walked by together on the way to the cinema, but she did not, even when I reminded her of these details, which, I have to say, did not seem to me to be entirely devoid of interest, it had been quite a successful evening, the one I was remembering, we had often had such successful evenings together. How’s that little rash? I asked her. That little rash? she said. Her mouth had changed, seemed somehow elongated, the lips were a touch thinner, paler. Her nose, too, looked different, was somewhat wider, a slight flaring of the nostrils, just a touch. It’s good to see you, I said. Umm, likewise, she said. Several cars went by. She looked at her watch. Somewhere in the distance a gun went off. On the job? I said. I’m not sure, she said. At this she smiled, almost bitterly it seemed, showing me teeth that were not quite as lovely as the teeth I remembered, but it had been some months, perhaps, in truth, somewhat longer, and I am not unwilling to admit that my own teeth, in that interval, had also undergone a not unremarkable measure of decline. I was preparing, in fact, to broach that subject when, somewhat abruptly and without further comment, she began to walk off. Hey, I said, and when, my interpolation having had no effect, I began to follow her, she sped up, and when I sped up, she started running, and when I started running, she ran faster than me. Never a fast runner, I had put on several pounds and had become something of a fatty at that time. This was not just a function of a regular intake of glazed pastries with pear and almond filling, it was also a function of cakes. I liked a good deal of chocolate in a cake and I could not go lightly on the butter. It was not, in fact, a cake at all for me during that period unless it was heavily iced, and it was not fit for consumption unless it was very large. Also, I had become fond of nuts and of