Ether

by Ben Ehrenreich

  I dress and leave the house, lock the door and take the bus. The sun is rising. I stare out the graffiti-scratched windows, at the chewing gum dried to the bolts on the floor. The sunlight filters in like mist. In the seat behind me, a white-bearded man snores. No, it’s not him, and not the other one. This one has no teeth, carries no bags, and wears no tattered suit, just turquoise sweatpants and a bright pink t-shirt that reads, “It’s not a bald spot — it’s a solar panel for a sex machine.” Though he is not even a little bit bald.

  The elevator’s broken again, so I climb the stairs again. Seven flights. I’m panting when I dig the key from my pocket to unlock my office door. The floor is littered with junk mail the postman shoved beneath the door. Credit card offers, office-supply catalogs, takeout menus. Deadly stuff. I leave it all there. The sun slants in thick and yellow through the blinds. Weird ochre trapezoids drift across the wall. This is where I sit and write to you, where I typed the page you’re reading now. I switch on the computer. It stares at me. I stare back. “We could do this all day,” I tell it.

  Outside, I can hear a preacher warming up. Most mornings, there’s a preacher in the park. This one expounds in blunt, staccato Spanish, his voice distorted by the squawk of the megaphone and the shifting wind and the brick walls of the buildings that stand between my window and the park. “Why do you walk the paths of sin?” he asks, but he’s not asking really. He’s not waiting for an answer. “Where will you store the wages of your unrighteousness?” Don’t count on my translations. I’m mainly guessing here. But I know I have the next line right. “Dios es amor,” he shouts, “y todo el amor que nosotros tenemos pertenece a dios, todo el amor que nosotros sentimos viene de dios, porque dios es amor y nos quiere el señor.”

  The funny thing is that the tone and the pitch of his voice do not shift at all when he gets to the bit about god being love. It’s all of a piece. That same squealing scold. Elementary kerygmatics, to weet, to weet, to woo. God is love, man undeserving. Stones are rock and rocks are stones. Fish and clods of earth are innocent. So are molecules of air. Man is perfect and pure. Man is love perhaps and god is vicious and corrupt. Animals are dumber than they look. Illness is spread via miasma, proximity to corpses, the evil eye. The distance between man and god is measured in sin. But whose sin, god’s or man’s? Volume is measured in pecks and pints and sometimes jeroboams. Depth in fathoms, life in fingernails and orgasms and other people’s funerals. Water is fluid except when it’s ice. Days end in evenings. Stars are always, always far away. Form is emptiness and emptiness form. Time a species of madness. Faith too. And lack of faith.

  I keep a couch in my office, a little bookcase, some instant coffee and a hot plate. The stranger’s lying on the couch. He wasn’t there a second ago, but he is now, with his feet up on the corner of my desk. He’s leafing through my dictionary.

  “Your feet,” I say.

  He looks up as if surprised to see me. “Do you know what fulminic means?” he asks after a moment.

  “No,” I say. He moves his feet.

  I brush flakes of mud from the corner of my desk. Outside, the preacher says something about sin, and something more about it. Pecado pecado vicio pecado. It’s hard to make out the rest. His bullhorn squeals. Its volume wavers. “Él regresará,” he says. He will return and walk among us. Then the megaphone goes silent. Snack time for the prophet. So much good news takes its toll.

  “What do you think?” I ask the stranger.

  “What do I think about what?”

  “About what he says.” I hook a thumb at the window to indicate the park below.

  The stranger closes the dictionary, places it like a pillow beneath his head. He lifts one nostril, shrugs. “Not much.”

  “That’s all,” I say. “Not much?”

  “What about ‘fugacious’?” he says.

  I swivel in my chair to face him. “Fleeting,” I say, “like sunsets, and lightning, and love. Like patience. Did you come here for a reason?”

  “Don’t be coy,” he replies. “I could ask you the same question.”

  “You could,” I admit. “Do you have anything to say?”

  “I’m saying it,” he answers.

  “You’re not saying anything.”

  He raises an eyebrow, grunts, bored. I toss a paper clip at him. It hits him in the nose. He doesn’t blink. I ask him if he wants to wrestle. He doesn’t hear me, or pretends he doesn’t. I repeat myself. “Do you want to wrestle?”

  He picks the paper clip up off his knee, where it has fallen, twists it straight, and returns it to my desk. He makes a face. “Wrestle you?”

  “Yeah. Me.”

  He shakes his head, annoyed. “No,” he says.

  “What then?”

  But he doesn’t answer, and when I look again he’s gone. The dictionary is still there on the couch, open to the Fs.

  I see the preacher later when I head downstairs for breakfast. I’m pretty sure it’s him. From the sidewalk, I spot him through the pharmacy’s automatic doors. A short man, with a peasant’s lanky walk. His hair combed flat against his head. He wears a brown suit that doesn’t fit him. Cuffs down almost to his thumbs. A megaphone hangs by the strap from one wrist. He’s laughing and flirting with the cashier. He mops at his forehead with a blue bandanna and buys a pack of batteries. She pushes his change across the counter, smiles shyly. Brakes screech behind me. A car hits a pigeon with a greasy thud. It lands in a shower of its own feathers on the sidewalk and lies there, eyes open, as if it’s got something hard to think about. Something that can’t wait. The preacher steps out of the store, grinning. The stranger, behind him, winks.

  The light.

  She had strayed too far. The dawn had come on with sudden violence, as if the horizon had been lit aflame. The warehouses were beginning to awaken. Just now, a truck had almost hit her. She couldn’t hear it of course, for she could not hear anything, but she felt the weight of it shake the asphalt and she felt the heat of it and when she turned it was just feet behind her, the red-faced driver shouting something from the cab. She pulled her shirts about her and hurried towards home.

  The hummingbird had died. She had tied a stocking around it so that its broken wing would not dangle. She had tried to feed it. She cut a ripe pear into hummingbird-size bits, but it would not take them. She walked a mile to the all-night liquor store and did not have to pretend not to hear the clerk yelling at her as she filled her pockets with packets of sugar. Pack by pack, she stirred the sugar into a mug filled with water from the drainpipe. She let the solution drip from her finger into the hummingbird’s beak. It would not swallow. She even gathered flowers — first more cast-off bouquets from outside the warehouse and later, when the bird ignored those, on the theory that wildness was a requirement of its nutrition, she plucked bougainvillea blossoms and the morning glories that climbed the chain-link fence above the embankment, poppies from the secret patch behind the high grass in the field beside the chroming shop, jasmine from the hedge in someone’s yard. She tied the stocking to a post outside so the bird could hang and almost fly. She waved the flowers one by one beneath it. But the bird disdained to acknowledge her offerings. On the morning of the third day, its little bowstring of a heart ceased quivering.

  She couldn’t bear the thought of burying it, of sticky dirt on its bright plumage, eternal interment for a thing meant to fly. Rodents might find it. Worms would be sure to. Death and stillness had rendered the bird heavy. She wanted to make it light again. She soaked the stocking in rubbing alcohol and tried to burn the hummingbird over a matchbox pyre. The flames danced, then guttered out before the feathers were even singed. She poured on more alcohol, with the same result.

  With the bird once again lodged in her pocket, she walked out to the gas station, farther than the liquor store. She retrieved a plastic pop bottle from the trash and waited for a customer. The first four who came refused her entreaties or pretended not to understand them, silent, gestural and panicked as her attempts at c
ommunication were. The fifth arrival smiled at her from the seat of his idling Toyota. He wore a trim goatee and a security guard’s uniform and his eyes were rimmed with red. “How you doing, Lilith?” he said, nodding as if he knew her. “What’s going on, baby?” Of course she could not hear him.

  The goateed man pulled a half-liter Evian bottle from the cup-holder beside him and took a long swallow of a foamy pinkish liquid. He squinted his eyes, jerking his head spasmodically about. He let out a long, slow whistling breath and offered the bottle to the woman through his window. She shook her head. He opened the door and lifted himself from his seat, groaning. His shirt was untucked. He put a hand out, beckoning with one crooked finger. “C’mere now, Lilith,” he said. “Just a lil’ bit closer.”

  The woman didn’t move.

  The goateed man’s eyes glowed with a watery sort of light. He tugged one ear and then the other. A smile tore suddenly at his face. Like a gymnast preparing for a leap, he pumped his arms twice at his sides and leaned back so far that the woman feared he would hit his head on the door of the car behind him. Then, like a rubber band stretched to its limit and released, he whipped forward again, bending at the waist and jumping now, hopping up and down on the heels of both black-sneakered feet, grabbing at the air and on the backswing squeezing his hands into fists. “Shock ’n’ awe, baby!” he yelled. “C’mere, Lilith! Let’s make a fucking party! I’m gonna call you Shock ’n’ Motherfuckin’ Awe!”

  She did not wait for him to step toward her. She aimed one sharp kick between his legs. The impact hurt her toes, but she ran anyway, clutching her skirts and the tiny dead bird in her pocket until she was beyond the reach of the fluorescent light that illuminated the pumps. She hid crouched in the bushes, trying not to move, waiting for her heart to slow, watching the goateed man leap about, red-faced now and sweating, howling and spitting and shadow boxing, drop kicking the air, head-butting it, hooting triumphantly and stomping his feet. Eventually the man grew winded. He pumped his gas and drove away.

  She waited until three more cars had come and gone before she emerged again from the brush. Only later, after four additional strangers had rejected her mute requests, did she encounter a willing accomplice, a little boy. He was topping off the tank of his father’s truck while the father used the restroom. Perhaps unaware of gasoline’s forbidden stupefactory potential and heedless of his parents’ oft-repeated injunctions regarding strangers, the boy allowed the woman to approach and fill her bottle from the pump.

  The hummingbird burned with an eager blue flame. She crouched and watched the smoke pour from its tiny form. When it had been entirely consumed and the flames, lacking further fuel, died down, she blew the ashes into the breeze and crawled into her bed. For nearly a week, she did not get out again except to squat in the dirt outside. She dreaded even that brief contact with the open air.

  But she realized eventually that if she did not force herself to get up, she simply never would, that only motion could pull her out of this. It did, and here she was as a result of its predation, caught by the approach of daylight, rushing homeward. The streets were already crowded with wheeling forklifts, men pushing handcarts, trucks in slow reverse. The buildings yawned, their mouths uncovered. The shutters above the loading bays had been rolled away and here and there between the trucks she caught a peek inside the warehouses: high-ceilinged expanses stacked to the roof beams with row upon row of crated goods, lit in a pale fluorescent windowless green. She dodged her way through the throng. Everyone ignored her. A pickup truck squeezed through the alley and nudged her aside with its bumper. Her hands began to tremble. A man, arms filled with boxes, backed into her and knocked her down without pausing to see what or whom he’d hit.

  Kneeling where she’d fallen, on one knee and with her palm against the street, she found that she was crying. She’d scraped the knee and maybe bruised an elbow — but it wasn’t that. The shock of the fall dislodged something in her, shook loose a stopper somewhere, and the tears rolled from her eyes. She stood. The sky was nearly light now. A semi steamed past just inches from her shoulder. A small gaggle of men laughing and drinking coffee from paper cups approached, briefly engulfed her, and walked on. The world moved through her like a river through a net. Her chin was wet. She swabbed at her cheeks with the heel of her hand.

  The woman did not feel sorry for herself. She could not complain of her deaf ears or her mute tongue, of her poverty or her solitude. These things had long been hers. Nor did she mourn the hummingbird. It was only a bird. Birds die. What she felt was something more diffuse, an ache carved out by all the rush and tumble of the universe, all its carelessness and the loneliness of things — not just the living and the sentient but the entire silent world of objects — cinder blocks, books, exhaust pipes. She could find no solidarity there. Everything was alone, everything misplaced. Everything was lost. The bird was not special. Nor was she.

  She pushed her way out of the alleys and made a dash across the lots. The landscape now seemed soaked in sadness, saturated, as if sorrow were the one thing that held it all together, that saved the world from dissolution, preventing all its constituent particles from spinning off to stake their claims alone. Telephone wires hung from the poles along the avenues and even the arc of them, the receding, conjoining lines of them, seemed to tell a story of aloneness and loss.

  She reached the fence. She was almost home. She looked back. The sun had risen from behind a cloud and was high enough now to light those wires so that they looked like filaments of gold leading off to some less doleful place. The dust raised by the passing trucks glowed gold as well. The cars in the lots glittered. Their hubcaps shone. The rooflines of the warehouses too, and every east-facing wall was remade by the dawn, gilded and bright, as if everything had been lit quietly aflame. Then the woman did a funny thing. She laughed. She wiped her nose and laughed. For all the light’s auroral trickery, the world seemed no less drenched with grief. But it was also something else, something almost complete and almost beautiful, but just beyond her reach.

  He goes a’rambling.

  The sun rose higher and the stranger’s suit, heavy and wet with dew, soon dried. His limbs loosened with the warmth. Insects woke by the millions and commenced to rub together their wings and their hairy stick-like legs, celebrating the heat of another day with a vast and undulating buzz as the stranger strolled back toward the city. He crossed the field of brambles through which the bagman had led him and there collected on his pants and on his socks and in the callused flesh of his ankles dozens of barbed golden spurs. He picked them off and found the old empty dog track, its high walls adorned with blackened glass tubes once alive with neon light, dim now but still twisted in the shape of racing greyhounds. He pushed through the rusted gate. The track had grown over with thistle and dandelion. Half the terraced wooden seats were splintered, smashed. Vines snaked across the scoreboard. In a corner on the ground over where the concession stand had been, among shards of glass in a dozen shades of brown and green, the stranger found the remains of the mechanized rabbit, once the root of so much fuss, torn now from its track, fur worn away and matted, one ear gone. He nudged it with his toe. What fur remained fell off, revealing wood and wire. He kicked at the rabbit’s wire-stuffed head and watched it bounce across the dirt.

  The stranger walked on until he found the train yards. He sat on a railroad tie and tossed a rock from palm to palm until among all the sleepy freights a commuter train zipped past, the sunlight bouncing off its tinted windows, blinding him. He stood and followed the tracks on which it ran out away from the city. The stranger kicked a stone in front of him, whistled a tune low into his beard. The tracks ran through block-long plains of rubble where brown brick apartment buildings had once towered. They skirted the base of a pyramidal mountain of trash fringed with soft green grass. Gulls screamed in the air above. One clutched a chicken bone in its beak. The others harried and attacked it. The stranger did not look up. The tracks took him past yawning sand pits,
truck yards behind barbed wire, the back doors of machine shops, rendering plants, shooting ranges, a brothel decked out in blue and violet neon. He came upon a boy leaping high on a trampoline set alone in the center of a field of broken bricks. He paused. The boy had not seen him. The stranger shifted his parcel from arm to arm. He tugged lightly at the string that bound it. The boy pulled his knees to his chest as he rose. His eyes rolled upwards, rapt. The stranger considered him for a moment, then retied the parcel and walked straight on.

  At last he reached a trestle where the tracks passed over a wide suburban street, empty, at this hour, of cars. He scrambled down the embankment to the road and caught his pant leg on a root, tore off half a cuff, cursed. A mile down that road he turned onto a smaller road, and from there onto a smaller road still, not paved but dirt and rutted. There he found a small clapboard house, paint peeling, windows boarded up. A camera was still mounted on the eaves above the door, but it did not blink or hum and its lens was furred with grime. The stranger sat on a log in the shade behind the house, facing a wide and overgrown lawn. Roses, untended, bloomed on woody, head-high stalks. Tomato vines had leapt from their cages and covered half the yard. The fruits hung red and heavy, dripping, entrails exposed by birds. He untied his shoes. They were ankle-high calfskin lace-ups with dainty inch-high heels and soles now paper-thin. He shook a rock or two from each one, poured the sand from his socks, and picked what dirt and lint he could dislocate from the spans between his toes. A grasshopper settled on his knee, a shocking green, but it leapt away before his hand could reach it.