The Impossibly

AFTERWORD

I WROTE THE BULK OF THE IMPOSSIBLY DURING ENFORCED leaves of absence from the United Nations, where I spent five years working, in various related capacities, in the Department of Public Information. The absences were enforced because I was, effectively, a contract worker and had to be off the payroll for a certain amount of time each year to avoid being considered a permanent employee, with all the rather extravagant benefits that standing entailed. Given that during the eleven-odd months a year I was on the work was often quite exhausting, I welcomed these obligatory furloughs and did my best to fill them to the extent possible (life, as it tends to, often making its curious interventions) with writing. The Impossibly got started, the first day of the first of these breaks in 1997, out of the conjoined impulse to write a love story and to write something long. Taking inspiration from the three books I happened to be reading at the time (The Oulipo Compendium, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and The Great Gatsby), the thing was launched. Three years and three breaks later I had three linked novellas. Or thought I did.

On a trip to Athens, where my wife Eleni was on a Fulbright, I reread the most recent quarter and decided it didn’t work at all. I liked it, which was something, but it didn’t work with the rest of the manuscript. I mean, what did I know, I was young, I’d never published a novel or a series of long linked anythings, but this didn’t, this third section I had written, hmmm, feel right. So I drank too much ouzo and wandered the streets of Athens’ old Turkish section for a few days then decided to write something new. There was a table, which had a view of the Acropolis, on the roof of Eleni’s building. I had a notebook with me. I wrote. I ate Greek yogurt, Greek salad, grilled meats. Vast quantities of meats. We took long walks through Athens. We traveled to Delphi and on to the Peloponnese. I kept writing. By the time I went back to New York, back to my work at the UN, the draft was done.

Or probably it didn’t happen quite that way. There was ouzo. There was a table with a view of the Acropolis (not to mention of an intervening [insert some sea-like word that is not sea here] of tangled wires, dusty awnings, and concrete rooftops). There was also yogurt and meat. In quantity. The yogurt came in little clay pots and was wonderfully aerated. But I’m not sure there was ever any conscious decision to start over. Even though I did start over. It sort of just happened. I see myself, badly blurred, starting to rewrite. I took a walk in some hills overlooking Athens while Eleni was at a Greek language class and when I came back down I had started up again. The notebook I used was a blue, quadrilinear, medium-size French Lafontaine: I know this because I still have the notebook. I had a Scheaffer fountain pen. I know that because I just know, even though the pen is now lost. Speaking of other things I know, most days during my stay I walked by a building that was completely shrouded with dark mesh. Such buildings were all over Athens, but this one took the cake. And devoured it. So that went into the new thing. As did the grilled meat and the ouzo and the Acropolis, though I didn’t call it that.

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.