Ether

by Ben Ehrenreich

  The bagman nodded, and took a bite.

  “And you just knew it was him?”

  The bagman nodded again.

  “What was he like?” the old man asked.

  The bagman considered the question carefully and took his time in answering. “Tall,” he said at last.

  “I suppose he would be. He kind of acts more like a short guy though.”

  “He wasn’t short,” the bagman said. After a long while he spoke again. “He slept real bad.”

  The old man grinned. “As well he should.” He shifted his weight from one knee to the other. “What do you think will happen,” he asked the bagman, “when you find him?”

  The bagman looked around as if expecting to find the words he needed waiting on a tree branch or perched on the eaves of the warehouse roof. He couldn’t find them.

  “You can’t help him,” the old man said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “He’s carrying too much stuff,” the bagman answered.

  The old man gestured at the bagman’s bags. “And you think you’re the one to help him with that?”

  The bagman’s eyes scoured the pavement in front of him as if he might find an answer for the old man there. He scratched himself, and squinched his face, and when he finally opened his mouth to answer, the cockatiel cut him off.

  “Think you’re much?” it screeched, “Know you’re living?”

  The old man laughed, and the bagman almost smiled.

  He performs a miracle.

  In the evening, the stranger lay on his back and watched the shadows chase one another about the walls as a breeze shook the wick of the lamp. The woman kneeled at his feet and watched him watch. His eyes turned to her, to the lamplight dancing across the rounded contours of her face. What she saw frightened her profoundly. It wasn’t hatred, and it would be hard to call it cruel. It was a hunger that had nothing to do with her, to which her presence was so completely incidental that she felt herself in danger.

  “Come here,” he said to her, and motioned her forward with one crooked finger. She pointed doubtfully to her breast, as if perhaps he were mistaken. The stranger nodded. “Yes, you.”

  The woman’s back was hunched with fear as she crawled on her knees to the stranger’s side. He sat up, and gestured for her to lean closer to his face. “Here,” he said. “Come here.” She closed her eyes, and leaned in towards him. She was shaking. The stranger took the deaf woman’s head between his hands and cupped his palms over her ears. “Hear,” he said. “Hear me.” He ran his fingertips down along her jaws and stuck the thumb and forefinger of each hand between her lips and into her mouth. She squirmed as he grabbed her tongue.

  “Speak,” he said, yanking her tongue out past her teeth. “Hear me and speak.”

  With his palm on her brow, the stranger pushed the woman from him. She fell back, and when she opened her eyes she regarded him at first with puzzlement. He had not hurt her. Then a grin crept across her face. With her mouth clamped shut to hide her broken teeth, she reached forward and cupped her own small palms over his ears. She waited a moment to see what he would do and, when he did nothing, she ran her fingers down through his white sideburns and beard. She stroked at his lips with the pads of her thumbs. They were cracked, his lips were, and bleeding still. She pulled them back and down so that he looked like a child making monkey faces. Devoid entirely of mockery, her grin stretched until it could grow no wider, then took living form as laughter, the first sound she had produced since the stranger’s arrival, a sort of low and choking glee.

  The stranger swatted her hands from his face and, with what little strength remained to him, he shoved the woman away. She skidded across the small, dark room. Her hair covered her face until she sat up, shook it off, and leaned her back against the quivering fiberglass wall, gagging and burbling and laughing still.

  “Idiot,” the stranger barked.

  The long night.

  Pigeon told his sisters nothing. They had begun to bug him, demanding that he tell them where he ran off to each morning. His older sister had noticed, though she did not mention this to Pigeon, that certain things about him had changed in the space of just two days. He did not kick every rock he came across, for instance, and he no longer circled every tree. He bobbed along undistracted in a more or less straight line. Maybe he had a girlfriend, the older sister speculated to the younger. The younger cackled and jumped at the hilarity of the thought: Pigeon kissing a girl. She stuck out her tongue and made her eyes go googly. Really though, it wasn’t girls that worried Pigeon’s older sister. Girls she could take care of. It was adults that worried her, and boys that liked to hurt things.

  On the third day after his discovery, he managed to lose them both. The older girl woke up before he did, but he dashed off while she was peeing and the little one was too slow to catch him. He took as circuitous a route as he could, stomping down the grass on false paths and doubling back in case they tried to follow. He spent the whole day bouncing, lost in the rhythm of it: the almost weightless sense of expectation as his feet left the trampoline; the feeling, as he flew upwards, that he might never stop, that he might this time break free forever of gravity’s hold and henceforth cruise weightless through the clouds; and then the brief but crushing disappointment as he lost momentum, seemed to stop a moment in midair, and fell again to start the cycle over. How could he share this bliss?

  That night Pigeon dreamed of the trampoline. He was with his mother and his sisters. The four of them held hands and bounced in a circle together, singing as they rose and fell a song so beautiful that it made his eyes hurt. In the morning, when he woke, his sister was already up. She saw his eyes blink open and immediately pounced. She sat on his chest. “You’re not going anywhere without me,” she said.

  Pigeon yawned and tried to shove her off. “Okay,” he said. “Get off me.”

  He didn’t tell them what it was. He led them through the bushes and the brambles, down the dirt road and under the bridge, through the yards and down the alley. As they got closer, pride quickened Pigeon’s steps. To his surprise, he felt no irritation at his sisters’ presence. For the moment at least, his heart thrilled at the thought of seeing joy bounce in their eyes.

  He led them across the lot and around the final corner. There it was, the heaped expanse of bricks. And in the middle: Nothing. Just more bricks. The trampoline was gone. Pigeon stood silent. His lower lip protruding. The bricks dug into his soles. “It was here,” he said.

  Hip cocked, his older sister tapped her foot. “What was here?” she asked.

  How could something so big just disappear?

  Pigeon tried to explain, but he could not. The portal had closed. It would not reopen here. His sisters did not believe him. They suspected him of untold disloyalties and crimes. He was not sure that they were wrong. Why else would he be punished?

  For the next few days, he avoided them. He slipped out extra early, and wandered with no goal in mind except to search for what he’d lost, and if not to actually find it, to somehow shake off his shame and disbelief. He bobbed through the lots and the alleys, counting his steps, kicking logs and circling rocks, knocking on everything, three times, five times, sometimes up to seven. Odd numbers that could not be divided.

  One night Pigeon did not go home. Sunset found him lost, and far from the makeshift shelter in which the three of them had lately slept. The darkness gathered. A dog barked and a minute later barked again. The second bark sounded closer than the first, so Pigeon climbed a tree and squatted in the crotch of its three conjoining trunks. The tree’s rough flesh scratched his ankles and his arms. He tried to sleep, but it was cold without his sisters there to hold him, and he was frightened by the sounds the night made. Somewhere the dog kept barking, sometimes close and sometimes far. An owl hooted. He could not see it, but he could hear the air whoosh through its wings as it swept low beneath the branches. Far off he thought he heard music sometimes, men shouting, breaking glass. Frogs croaked as if they
were much larger beasts. Pigeon drifted off, but the moment his muscles eased towards slumber, he woke, fearing he would fall. Shapes appeared and disappeared, bringing noises with them. Shadows swelled and shriveled. The leaves trembled with the breeze. Pigeon thought of his two sisters, the warmth of their small bodies, the smell of them.

  At last the sky began to lighten. If only because the night was over, Pigeon was thankful for the day. He climbed down, his limbs stiff from shivering. He circled the tree three times and knocked seven times on each of its three trunks to be sure he hadn’t missed something. His head hurt from hunger and his legs felt weak. He walked to the next tree and the next, circling each one and rapping on its trunk, varying slightly his pattern of knocks, then re-testing previously abandoned patterns, inspecting each tree’s bark and tugging at its lowest branches. In this manner Pigeon found his way out of the woods and into a clearing of trampled dirt beside which stretched the railroad tracks. He was relieved: he could find his way home eventually, he knew, by following the tracks. For a moment his chin stopped bobbing. He kicked at a crumpled ball of oil-stained brown paper, but it was too heavy with dew to roll very far.

  On the ground he spied a soiled length of twine. He grabbed one end and pulled it, but it was attached to nothing and came up limp in his hand. He dropped the string, and noticed beside it a curious stone. It was not gray or brown or white like the other stones around it. It appeared to simultaneously contain all colors and to be no color at all, to shine and to be dull. Pigeon picked it up and saw that it was not a stone, but a shard of bone. It felt warm in his hand but made his flesh feel cold. He held it to his eye and saw that he’d been wrong. It was not a shard of bone. It was a diamond, tarnished with dust and as big as the top joint of his thumb. He took a breath, closed his fingers over it, and looked around to be sure no one had seen him. When he opened them again his hand concealed no precious gem, just the tiny, cold, wet body of a mouse. He jumped and dropped the thing. But kneeling to look at it, he found no mouse there, no diamond, bone or rock, just a slender dagger, its haft hammered from the same dark steel as its blade. It fit perfectly in Pigeon’s palm and when he held it all the anguish of his long night seemed to spread up his arm and to fill his ribs to bursting. He felt chilled from the inside out. The agony of his smallness, his aloneness, his inability to protect or be protected seemed to course like a current through his bones. It hurt him terribly. The dagger lengthened. Pigeon’s chin shivered and tears rolled down his cheeks. He could not let go of it. He held the thing as far from his body as he could. The trees in front of him glowed a gentle orange. They quivered for a moment and appeared to bleed before bursting softly into flame.

  He journeys out, again.

  When the sun’s first light slithered through the hovel’s doorway, the stranger was already standing. The woman slept on the floor at his feet. Her hair hung over her mouth, and rose and fell with her every intake of breath. The stranger wrapped a blanket around his waist. He kicked the woman awake. “Come on,” he said. He grabbed her by the shoulder and growled, “don’t touch me,” but she of course did not hear him, and smiled at his touch. She squeezed his hand, rubbed the sleep from her eyes and followed as he, lips white and spine unyielding, staggered on outdoors.

  This time all the dolls but one ignored him. A red-headed doll with a pink, stockinged face turned away from him and bent at the waist, showing the stranger its cleft, molded buttocks and winking up through its legs. The others stood inanimate, staring dumb and dead through long-lashed eyes as the stranger and the deaf-mute hurried by.

  On the other side of the bulwark of brush, the world opened up to them. Everything was a sharp yellowish-pink, not yet drained of color by the day. Sirens wailed somewhere off to their right. In the opposite direction, the one from which the stranger had arrived some days before, thick woods rose all around the train tracks. Directly beneath him, though, a wide lot had been cleared of trees, and was still swampy from the rain. A heron stood there with one foot in the murk, waiting, apparently, for fish. To its right, the rear ends of warehouses and factories flanked the tracks, and from the slight height at which he and the deaf-mute woman stood, the stranger could see suburbs stretching off into the distance: an endless and unvaried plain of box-like structures with flat tarpaper roofs, the uniformity of the terrain broken only by the occasional wide boulevard and by outcroppings of billboards and high plastic signs, some of them slowly rotating, boasting of gasoline, donuts, hamburgers, liquor, live nude girls, quik and e-z oil changes. Smoke, almost scarlet in the morning light, obscured the horizon. Many of the buildings appeared to be on fire.

  He stumbled down the slope, falling twice, not looking at the woman as she labored to help him up. They walked along the tracks toward the town, stepping with care from one tie to the next. Every ten or twelve steps, the stranger would pause, lean against the woman, and catch his breath. After a few minutes of slow and jerky progress, he lurched away and pulled her down to recline on the ballast and rest. The stranger was sitting there in his blanket, clutching his ribs, the deaf-mute woman beside him, reaching out with one tentative hand to stroke his hair, when three boys came running down the tracks. Two were thin and one was fat. The stranger had encountered them before. They wore torn windbreakers. Their faces were blackened from smoke. One wore a backwards baseball cap. They passed within a yard of the woman and the stranger. The panicked eyes of the first two took in nothing but the ground in front of them, and hardly that, and they ran on without pause. The last one though, the fat one, saw the stranger there and froze. He looked at the stranger and then at his own feet before noticing that his friends had run off without him, that he was alone. With a grunted “wait up,” he sprinted on to join them.

  The stranger laughed at the apparition. “Where’s your friend?” he yelled after the boys, and to himself chuckled, “There were four,” but his fractured ribs had not yet healed, and laughter hurt him, so he clutched his chest in pain. Using the woman’s head for support, he pushed himself to his feet again.

  They walked and paused and walked and rested, and as the smell of smoke grew sharper, the stranger’s grip on the woman’s shoulder grew tighter, and her steps became more hesitant. The sirens stopped. No birds sang. Ash lingered in the air like snowflakes on a windless day. At last they passed beneath a trestle and over a bridge, and reached the outmost ring of fire. The warehouses on both sides of the tracks were burning. The flames were blue, and green, and looked more like water than fire, a light, defiant liquid, able to skip, and leap, and burn. The earth on all sides of them had turned a glistening black. It bubbled and oozed and hardened fast in jagged, glassy peaks. The warehouses crumbled soundlessly. The flames faded. The earth hissed.

  As if quickened and strengthened by the heat, the stranger scampered suddenly off the tracks and up through the ash to the top of the embankment. The woman ran beside him. He stopped at the top and gazed off into the fires, as if searching for someone or for something. For blocks, the sidewalks boiled. Shop windows danced and shimmered like the surface of a storm-tossed sea. Angels of smoke advanced in ordered legions across the sky, blowing banks of ash before them. The stranger’s eyes focused on the point of calm, perhaps a mile off, from which the conflagrations seemed to radiate. But it was too far, even for eyes as sharp as his, to make out the crumpled silhouette of Pigeon crying.

  The stranger’s strength deserted him. His features paled, then darkened. “Let’s go,” he said, and turned around. After seven steps, his knees gave out, so the woman laid him in the blanket, and dragged him home.

  I finish my story.

  The helicopter wakes me again. Not the searchlight this time, just the din of it, that low, thwacking drone growing louder then low then loud again as the helicopter orbits above. It wakes her too beside me, but just long enough to blink once or twice, groan, and roll over into sleep. I lie on my back and watch the ceiling fan spin and the camera light flicker as it’s obscured by the blade on each rotation. Her
hair spreads across the pillow, tickles my chin. Her fist clenches and unclenches on my chest. Somewhere I hear the faint yowl of a siren and then another one, closer than the first, rouses the neighborhood dogs and gives pause to the coyotes, who are already awake, padding through the streets and the alleys. All of them join in, the dogs locked each in their backyard pens, the coyotes at large in the shadows, all of them together howling with the ambulance and the cop car or the fire truck, becoming for just a moment a single, unbroken, primal pack, united by one inchoate thirst that stretches up from yard to yard and street to street across the city.

  I get up, slip on my slippers, find a clean-ish t-shirt on the floor. In the kitchen, I pour myself a finger of whisky, and then another finger. I sit on the couch, feel between the cushions for the remote and with it click the television on. The TV takes a moment to blink to life but when it does the image is strange, a blurred, quivering, greenish black and white. It looks like someone being filmed from above, sitting hunched on a sofa, sipping at a drink. I get up to check the cables and the someone on the screen gets up too. It’s me. He is. I look up and to the right at the camera bolted to the ceiling. The guy on the screen does too. I can see him out of the corner of my eye. He looks out, through the lens, right at me. Looped again. Fucking camera interfering with the reception. I slap the TV and the image shifts. Another blurred and static shot, this one blinking twice a second from green to black and back again. A bed, also shot from above. A furrowed landscape of bunched up sheets. A bare arm hanging off the bed. A fan blade obscures the lens, circles back, again. The camera in the bedroom. I turn the television off.

  I empty my drink, pour myself another and bring the glass outside with me to the porch. The siren’s gone and the dogs have gone to sleep again. The stars are dim. The moon, tentative, half full, hovers just above the horizon. The crickets shriek. The power lines sway in the breeze. A streetlight flickers, and in its yellow light I see a shape on the concrete path just beneath the steps to the porch. It’s a body. I reach inside, turn on the porchlight. I half expect to find a drunk, or someone overdosed or stabbed, but it’s the stranger. Face down. He wears no clothes. I can see his long white hair, his dull scapula jutting like wings, his bare and skinny buttocks.