The Impossibly (26 page)

A year or so later, back in New York, I realized two things. The first was that what I had written was a novel (not an Austerian or Beckettian or Flaubertian or Steinian trilogy), and the second was that if I borrowed a bit from the end of the abandoned, original third section, the one that I rejected in Greece before eating the already overdiscussed meat and yogurt, not to mention buckets and buckets of the inevitable, inimitable Greek salad, the novel would be more and/or less complete. Which is how it remains. Perhaps now even more so since the amputated section, which long ago grew its own name and lived its own brief solo life on Amy Fusselman’s
Surgery of Modern Warfare,
before serving for some time as a sample text in a series of long letters called
Dear Laird Hunt, Author of
“
The Impossibly,”
has come back to sit with its confrères in uneasy company.

Readers may be charmed or not to know that for a time after I had written the first section of
The Impossibly
, my idea was to continue the book by writing, in the mode of Kafka’s great story “The Burrow,” the story of a clownfish who has strayed into, and cannot find his way out of again, a submerged Louvre. The clownfish, who would narrate, was to swim through the vast, watery halls, perch unhappily behind support girders in the space at the small of the back behind the Winged Victory of Samothrace, visit the still-shimmery cases of preclassical Greek statues, gaze with a longing it doesn’t understand the source of at Durer’s autoportrait, the one where he is young and holding thistles.

This section was to be followed by the third-person study of a man who has been locked into some devilishly accurate recreation of the Luxembourg Gardens. Each day meat and old crepes would be thrown over the bars to him. The idea wasn’t at all developed and says perhaps more than I would like about its positor’s state of mind in the late 1990s. As does, I suppose, the thing about the clownfish. Which is really the same story. Just as it, the thing about the clownfish, is more and/or less the same story as the first section of
The Impossibly
. Which ends up repeating itself in its subsequent sections anyway.

Albeit differently.

COLOPHON

The Impossibly
was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Cochin with Metropolis titles.

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