Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  The epileptic laughs. “Okay,” he says, finishing his chewing. “Okay. They were your friends. I know. I know.”

  The wind washes away most of the noise of the carnival. The sound of the games. The music blaring from the unused rides. All the normal sounds are carried away just as they are created, so that it sounds as if the carnival were happening not here, but half a block away.

  The carousel operator says, in a moment, “There were things that happened,” then pauses. His hair whips around his face. He pushes it back. He says, “Things I won’t describe.”

  The epileptic chews. In a moment, he says, “Tell me something.”

  The carousel operator looks away, toward the coin toss games. A carny throws quarters at bottles. The wind drives the quarters upward, to the side. The carny’s laughing. Throwing quarters into the impossible wind.

  The carousel operator looks back at his friend. Right into the epileptic’s eyes. The first time he’s done so. The epileptic hadn’t known this.

  But now he does.

  The epileptic stares back. He doesn’t chew. Doesn’t speak. He feels the air blow, the cotton candy shaking in the wind.

  His friend still stares.

  “You didn’t know them,” the kid says finally. Staring still. The kid can feel it. What it does for him to stare into this epileptic’s eyes. “You didn’t know them,” he says again, leaning toward his friend. “But there’s a way in which we had come to believe that none of us could ever die.”

  The soot and smoke of diesel oil rising from the massive ships that sail the oceans.

  Flotillas of plastic bottles, drawn together, miles across, and there’s no plan, no intent, no will to clean this up.

  Drift nets fifty feet deep and fifty miles long, left to float with the current, ghosts now, that haunt the ocean, collecting millions of animals not intentionally, not to eat, but by accident, entangled animals, all of them left to die.

  He hits the man hard, in the throat, then moves to the side as the man doubles over, the man holding the side of his head, shocked somehow, that he could be hit in the throat.

  It’s been a week since the last fight.

  The epileptic watches this. But does not understand. He’s on the ground. Shaking. A seizure having overtaken his whole being.

  They’re in a bar again. In a small downtown. Hitched a ride. The epileptic once more wanting to try to see the real town.

  Not a big crowd here. Maybe twenty people. Thirty. Some playing pool. Most sitting at tables.

  One of the TVs is showing helicopter footage of the flooding. The buildings falling over. They play that over and again. But also the damage left behind. Footage of the low wall of water pushing its way across flat, muddy farmland. Water pushing cars off a highway stretching northward, water pulling people from their cars, water overtaking those who try to outrun the wave. Still others are standing on a small, muddy hill next to a church. An island, it seems, surrounded by mud and water, the group on the hill just watching the helicopter as it passes by.

  But some of them on that island, the little kids especially, start slowly waving their arms.

  The fight started when the epileptic put his hand on the carousel operator’s arm. Like he was going to use his friend’s arm to stand. But he just held it. Tightly now. The carousel operator turned to him, the epileptic staring forward, white spit forming at his mouth.

  “Hey man,” the kid said, standing, voice rising as he talked toward the bartender, “I need a wooden spoon.”

  The kid leaned the epileptic down to the ground. The epileptic’s body was frozen, except for his shaking hands. The bartender handed the kid not a spoon but a wooden stick, a drumstick, and the kid took it and shoved it into the epileptic’s mouth. He had the epileptic on the ground now. The epileptic was groaning low, but his hands weren’t shaking hard, only clenching now, fists so tight that his fingernails dug into his palms.

  Some guy nearby had started laughing.

  The carousel operator was kneeling down over the epileptic. But he looked over at the laughing man. “Stop,” he said.

  The guy said, “Can’t handle his drink.”

  The carousel operator stood, staring at the guy. “Stop,” he said.

  The guy flipped him off. “Fuck you.” He was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt, a big guy with a thick chest and his forearms covered in tattoos, a snake tattooed around his neck.

  The kid looked down at the epileptic. Biting so hard on the drumstick that the kid could see slivers of wood separating off, getting caught on the epileptic’s lips.

  The guy with the snake tattoo tossed a piece of ice at the epileptic.

  The kid stepped quickly, crossing the ten feet to the man in the yellow T-shirt just faster than anyone can later remember, already hitting him even before the man could stand up. He’s a huge man, twice the kid’s size, and the kid knows somewhere that he can’t let the man get up. If he lets this man stand, the kid knows, knows without articulating a strategy or a plan, he knows that this man could hurt him badly.

  So he’s going to hurt him first. Render him lame.

  He’s hitting the guy in the throat, again and again even as the guy is still sitting in his wooden chair. The chair has arms, which is good because otherwise the man would be able to slide out from under the kid’s swinging fist. But instead he can only duck his head down, raise his arms, try to stand straight up, but the chair’s pushed against the table, so that now the guy in the yellow shirt is like an overgrown child strapped into a high chair.

  The kid keeps hitting him. In the ear when the man turns his head away, in the face every time he tries to stand.

  Again, there’s blood everywhere. Again, there’s the screaming. The guy screaming not so much in pain yet, but in frustration at not being able to stand or get away.

  The guy has friends. But they haven’t moved. Frozen, as they stare at this kid standing over their friend, hitting him so many times that it doesn’t seem possible this wasn’t planned long ago, some fight come to life as a result of long-hurled insults or a lifetime’s grudge.

  The kid’s hand is covered in blood. His own blood. And the blood from this man.

  The man is still stuck in the chair, bouncing side to side, trying to get out of it. But the kid has put his foot on one of the horizontal rails on the chair, is pressing down on it, so the chair won’t move.

  The guy bobs left and right and forward.

  But slowly now. Dumbly.

  The kid can’t feel his hand or arm. He just keeps swinging. Right arm only. Again and again, hitting the guy twice each time. As he swings down at the man’s face. As he raises his hand to swing again, the back of his fist knocking the man once more in the throat.

  One of the friends stands now. His haze or hallucination broken.

  The kid wheels around, pushing the friend with both his hands, hard, in the sternum, so that the guy is rocked back, stumbling, falling over his own chair, onto the concrete floor. The kid kicks him in the ribs, then the neck, then the side of the head.

  Behind the kid, the man in the yellow shirt still bobs side to side. Slowly. Hands half raised. Fending off an assault that he doesn’t know has ended.

  The other friend, the third at the table, he keeps looking around.

  The kid kicks the man on the ground again, in the back, again and again, till the guy on the ground simply struggles to breathe.

  The kid now looks at the third friend. The friend’s hands are on the table. Ready to stand.

  The kid takes a breath, another, holding this one for a second, closing his eyes, another second. He shouldn’t pause. He knows this. But he does pause. He waits.

  And when the kid exhales, a moment later, he exhales hard, a kind of scream, that blows blood and spit from his mouth all across the table.

  He yells at the third man, “Don’t fucking stand!”

  The kid is breathing hard, shoulders rising with each breath. The blood across his face is from where he’s bit his li
ps. No one hit him. No one touched him. He simply split his own lips in three places, biting down on them as he beat those two men unconscious.

  The third man stares. Hands on the table. Ready to stand. He’s been told, his whole life, that you always stand.

  “I’m telling you,” the kid says, more quietly now, almost a whisper, a voice that’s all air, he can barely breathe, snot from his nose running across his cheeks, his eyes are wet and red, “please, I’m telling you to please don’t fucking stand.”

  Pig shit, massive pools of it held in ponds carved out of the dirt, shit slowly seeping into lakes and streams and groundwater, shit-borne bacteria spreading from hog farm to spinach farm to reservoirs to city drinking water.

  The rainbow-colored sheen of oily pesticides, collecting now in the drainage ditches at the end of furrows plowed into the fields.

  Cattle sometimes butchered while they still stand, staggering but alive, workers too callous or disinterested or just too numb to care that the maul no longer kills the animal they stand before. Instead, the blood of that creature, bits of live flesh and functioning organs, it all runs into drains on the concrete floor, washed down, bypassing filters long since disconnected, entering the sewers, is it alive still when it finds its way to the nearby river?

  They walk into the wind. Between dark buildings that seem to concentrate the force of the air.

  The epileptic stares ahead. “Most people only say they were bad,” he says. “But they don’t mean it. Or if they mean it, it’s not real.”

  The carousel operator leans forward as he walks. Wind pushing harder against them. “It’s real,” he says.

  The epileptic nods.

  They walk under banners attached to streetlights. The area is mostly empty. Stores closed. Only a burger place seems occupied. A crew cleaning the floor and counters.

  The banners flap loudly, their metal wires hitting hard against the poles.

  TOMORROW’S CITY … TODAY.

  “You can die, you know,” the epileptic says. “All of us. We can die.”

  The kid nods. He can still taste blood. From the cuts he bit into his lips.

  He thinks for a moment about the girl. Back home. He barely knew her. Quiet girl. Certain of something, though he didn’t know what. They had sex. Different sex than he’d ever had before.

  He’s not sure if he loved her. He’s not sure how he would know.

  “We go north tomorrow,” the epileptic says. “Toward some city that’s been abandoned.”

  They walk in silence.

  “Sounds like a real moneymaker,” the epileptic says. “Crowds and crowds, I expect.”

  The carousel operator turns to him. Shakes his head. “Man,” he says. “Man.”

  “You and me,” the epileptic says, “we’ve put ourselves in the hands of a real visionary operation. My future, it seems bright.”

  The carousel operator shakes his head. Spits blood. The epileptic sees him barely smile.

  “And yours,” the epileptic says, “yours is just unlimited.”

  The wind blows heavily, in their faces, against their chests. They lean forward, step after step; it’ll take twice as long to return to the carnival as it did to leave.

  “All of us,” the epileptic says. “All of us can be killed. You know that, right? We can be killed. And we can kill others.”

  The carousel operator turns to him. The epileptic stares.

  “And each time,” the epileptic says to the kid, “you almost do.”

  Cities where, every day, people must cover their faces with masks because of the pollution.

  Cities where children and the elderly aren’t allowed to go outside for weeks and weeks.

  Cities where coal plants burn unfiltered, the smokestacks casting shadows across houses and parks and schools.

  To breathe is to taste. Plastic, smoke, rotted wood. It lingers in your throat. It pours freely through your nose, finally coating your tongue. The flavor of eventual disease.

  He walks past churches. Sunday mornings. Wednesday nights.

  He walks past them to hear the music. The words of the priest. Repeated. He can mouth along with them.

  Long held memories.

  He likes the sound of everyone standing. Lifting themselves, a slight step; there’s a wind almost, the force of combined motion as they all now stand in place.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Doctor

  Massive flocks of geese land in the ponds in city parks, the birds battling for space to drink and bathe in the water. The geese come by the thousands, hour after hour, some soon rising to join the flocks still passing overhead, other geese staying on the ground for hours. In just a day they’ll drain the ponds of water, leaving behind only the mud and their droppings and the lame, dying geese who can’t travel any farther north.

  He hears about the flooding all along the Gulf. They get newspapers here, and he’s able to afford a phone, and there are makeshift restaurants, set up in tents, with televisions tuned to sports or to the news.

  He sits now, in the evening, in one of the restaurants in the camps. His wife did not want to join him tonight. This happens. More and more.

  It’s not about you, she says. She just doesn’t want to go out.

  He eats chicken and rice and drinks a reasonably good glass of wine. He watches the Spanish-language news. Reports from the Gulf. Flooding in all directions from the earthquake and the hurricane. To the south it was the storm, not the earthquake, that did the worst of the damage. Wind and rain pushing onto the mainland at top velocity, killing tens of thousands in just minutes. Wiping out the coastal towns. Flattening the lush resorts overgrown and unattended for so many years, their remnants finally washed away. Mudslides in the coastal mountains killing thousands more, people buried alive where they slept or prayed.

  Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. Their homes destroyed or rendered too dangerous to inhabit. They wander the streets. Countryside. Pleading with reporters and cameramen for help.

  The doctor watches. Then reads more about this on his phone. Then drinks from his glass of wine.

  He knows that such a storm, that type of damage in the south, it will send even more people fleeing north across the border. To the wall near here, where they’ll try to buy their way through one of the many tunnels. Or they’ll pay to board one of the hundreds of boats traversing the Gulf illegally.

  The news reports shift to the damage in the delta. Cars fleeing a wave making its way up a highway. People stranded on the overpasses, or hills in farmland, buildings in the city. Buildings that soon collapse.

  He drinks again. It all leaves him breathless. The buildings falling over. The mudslides near where his parents lived before they died. The prospect of people, men and women and children, all moving north in greater numbers. So many will die. In the heat of the desert. At the hands of smugglers who will abandon them at any moment. Or on the small boats that flood out into the Gulf, frantically trying to bypass the ships that patrol those waters. Boats overloaded, captained badly by men who have no training or ability, just a desire to make money off the desperation of so many fleeing people.

  An hour later, back at his tent, his wife is not there. She’s left a note.

  Gone for a walk.

  He undresses. Gets into his small bed. Turns the lights out. And now he pictures the people, all heading north. He remembers the faces of those who fled with him and his wife when they made their journey. Poor, wealthy, uneducated, children. So many babies. He asked an old woman to lean on his arm for at least two days. Finally, she could not keep up. She was alone. Traveling by herself. She begged him to let her stop. He left her to sit in the narrow shade of a dead tree along a road.

  With his eyes open or closed, all he can picture is the people.

  He wishes his wife were here. He wonders where she’s gone. He wonders if she’s safe. He wonders when they will be able to leave.

  Algae blooms spread through lakes, ponds, the fenced-off reservoirs
of the largest cities. Green and slick along the surface of the water, or brown and thick and barely visible from above, the blooms spread for miles, a hundred feet deep. Fed by fertilizer, phosphates, an excess of nutrients. The algae dies nearly as fast as it can spread, creating masses made up of tons of dying matter, clogging creeks, clogging shorelines, clogging pipes meant to bring water to nearby farms and towns and cities.

  In just a week, the camp begins to feel the arrival of people displaced by the storm.

  The doctor treats them in the hospital tent. Some of the wealthier ones come to him at his tent, having learned already where they should go for extra care.

  They have injuries of all kinds. Broken bones from the impact of the storm. Feet so blistered from the march across the desert that toes and heels and soles are infected, bloody rotted messes pulled painfully from their boots and socks. Bodies sunburned and dehydrated from days out in the Gulf. Eyes damaged when a person fell into waves thick with all that oil from the collapsing rigs. Another man’s hair is still stained and tangled with crude oil; the man picks at it as the doctor checks his eyes. Heart patients, cancer patients, diabetics, epileptics, all of whom have gone days or weeks without their necessary medication.

  But for many, what they need is not medicine or bandages, not splints or ice or crutches. What they need is care for their minds. What they’ve been through they can’t yet describe. Accept. Or believe.

  They stare blankly at the doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” they’ll say. “I just need your help.”

  The doctor works sixteen and twenty hours a day. At the hospital or in his own tent. And still the lines grow longer.

  Periodically, a gang member will find the doctor. Motion to him. It is time to go to the other tents. A group of girls has arrived. They need checking. This, they make clear, will be his immediate priority.

  Fifteen of them. Dark-haired, olive skin. The girls are beautiful. They are sought out, across many countries. Other girls are brought through other camps. Girls and women who are shipped off to the mining settlements and oil fields north and west of here. To live out of cheap motels. Motor homes or trailers. There to service the seasonal, transient workers who man the equipment that pulls fuel and minerals from the ground.