Ether

by Ben Ehrenreich

  The stranger ignores the dog. “You’re not going to answer me?” he asks.

  “Should I?”

  “You should.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I asked.” He seems quite sure of this.

  I smile. “Not good enough,” I say. The stranger stares at me, his eyes aflame. I want to laugh, but don’t. Really, I don’t want to be cruel. Or not gratuitously so. The chow keeps snapping at the chainlink. It’s foaming at the mouth. I don’t feel good about this. In fact I feel a little sick.

  “Are we wrestling now?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I try to smile. “We’re wrestling.” The light changes. The sign says WALK. I walk. He’s not beside me anymore. I don’t look back.

  I take the side streets. I return to my worries. They waited for me. I do the math. I leap a puddle at the entrance to an alley and watch two sparrows fight inside an empty bag of cheese puffs. The bag twists and crinkles and jerks as if driven by some invisible conglomeration of gears, or by its own bumbling baggish will. One of the birds expels the other. It emerges dredged in day-glo orange dust, and flies away. For a second, I’m jealous of its flight. Maybe for longer than a second. Then the other sparrow flies away. The wind takes over where the birds left off, lifting the bag in the air.

  I turn a corner and another corner and climb the last block up the hill to my house. Her car is not in the driveway. The house will be empty. I’m hungry, and can’t remember what’s in the fridge. Peanut butter if nothing else. I lift the latch to the low wrought-iron gate and close it again behind me. Of course the stranger’s there already, pacing on my porch, his arms behind his back. He’s not whistling anymore.

  “I won’t ask twice,” he says.

  “That’s fine,” I tell him, digging into my pocket for the key.

  A dog trots past on the sidewalk behind me, its nose to the concrete. Its coat is speckled, almost blue. Tail busy, ears alert. If dogs can smile, it’s smiling. A loose-lipped piebald grin. It lifts a leg and dribbles piss on the gardenias. The stranger croaks out something like a laugh. “This time,” he says, “you’re the one behind the fence.”

  “Look around,” I say. “Where are you?”

  Rush hour.

  The bagman stood on the corner. It was the time of morning known colloquially as rush hour, when the world fades to blur and humankind is granted collective license not to notice its surroundings, to gaze upon creation with the utmost pragmatism, regarding all objects solely as potential obstacles. This is a bad time. Motion is all that matters at this hour, and motion is what occurs, a mass, one-way migration. The endpoint of this pilgrimage, be it office, kitchen or factory floor, is the single image permitted to float before the mind’s eye, odious though that image may be to its bearer. So the bagman, though he formed an island — an archipelago, if you count his three lumped bags — in a veritable sea of pedestrians, was for all intents and purposes, despite his girth, his appearance and his unorthodox scent, invisible.

  He stood and watched the throng surge past. Men in suits bustled officiously by, and men in pressed khakis, and in canvas coveralls. Women in heels and binding skirts of worsted wool clicked past, and some in blue jeans, and in the pink and white uniforms of maids. None slumped. All held their shoulders high and chins forward as if hooked by the collar and pulled workward by a covert network of the slenderest monofilament. The bagman, who had once upon a long-lost time been one of them, watched in awe. How religiously they must regard creation to be able to march so surely through it, and to ignore it so completely.

  The bagman slumped. He scratched himself. He belched and belched again, loudly. No one looked his way. On the opposite corner, across a clogged river of howling, honking cars, one figure stood out. One man stood still, a tall and almost skeletally thin man wearing thick eyeglasses over clear, blue eyes of an almost shocking innocence. He had a long, pale face that looked like it had been carved with dull tools from a tree trunk. His hair was red and curly and unevenly styled, as if he had attempted to paste it flat against his skull with gel, but had lost interest halfway through. Around his neck hung a choker of black-rimmed camera lenses strung with kitchen twine. Beneath that a loosely knotted tie. He wore a sandwich-board over his clothes and held a megaphone before his lips. He appeared to be preaching. Don’t confuse him with the man I heard preaching through my window. This was a different sort of preacher. He did not mention love at all. Or even sin.

  From across the avenue, the bagman could not hear a word he said, and could not make out the text printed on his board. The sun glinted off the lenses around the preacher’s neck, blinding the bagman. Intrigued, he shouldered his bags and when the light changed, he joined the rushing masses and crossed the street.

  The bagman sat on the gum-stained concrete at the base of a lamppost and leaned against his bags. Above him hummed a camera. Knees, ankles, hemlines hurried by. The tall man with the megaphone stood a few paces away, curiously motionless. Between the legs of the passing workers, the bagman struggled to read the front of the preacher’s signboard. Written there, in green magic marker, were these words:

  Why do you sleep, O Lord?

  Why do you hide your face?

  The preacher looked lost. He let the megaphone dangle at his thigh. His jaw hung slack. Pedestrians bumped him from all sides. He teetered, and fought to keep his balance. His chin twitched. One eye twitched, then his nose, and his cheekbones one by one. Each lip twitched, and each temple, each twitch a required step in a sequence of preparatory impulses necessary before some crucial internal circuit could be breached. Then a wave of determination overtook him. He placed himself squarely in the path of one man, and then another. They pushed him casually aside as if bending back a branch that hung too low over the trail in front of them. Undiscouraged, he held the megaphone to his mouth. A peal of feedback screeched from it. The crowd flinched, like fish do when a shadow passes over the surface of their pond. The man bent his lips into words, but no sound came forth. At last he stuttered, “H-h-h-h-h-h-h-how, h-h-how long?” He gazed deliberately around him as if expecting an answer to his query, but no one save the bagman and the cameras mounted high on the lampposts so much as glanced his way.

  The preacher let the megaphone drop to his side. A strand of red hair unglued itself from his scalp and dangled over the earpiece of his glasses. His body slackened, as if some vital quality had been emptied from him. He let himself be jostled, and almost fell. Then once again, twitching overcame his features and he was suddenly renewed. He set his feet firmly apart. He squared his shoulders and filled his lungs with air. The lenses around his neck clattered into place. With booming conviction and without a moment’s stutter, he declared, “He walks among us!” But he forgot to use the megaphone. The clatter of heels on the pavement and the screeching of the traffic swallowed his voice entirely. He remembered the thing in his fist and lifted it again to his lips. It was too late. All he could get out was another stammered “H-h-h-h-he . . .” before his enthusiasm again abandoned him.

  The bagman sat among his bags like a giant, begrimed ceramic Buddha. He watched the stuttering preacher with great and growing interest. The crowds around them at last began to thin. The commuters’ pace appeared to vary inversely in relation to the density of the crowds. The fewer there were, the more they hurried, as if solitude were a substance to be fled, a swarming pathogen, some noxious gas. The final few raced along the sidewalk, briefcases flapping like strange vestigial wings. Then they too disappeared around corners and through tall revolving doors.

  At last the sidewalk was empty, the street free of cars. The preacher stood alone on the corner. His face was gray. Beneath the sandwich board, his tie hung limp. His shirt was drenched in sweat. He wrinkled his nose, as if noticing for the first time the odor hovering around the lamppost, radiating from the bearded man who sat beneath it. The preacher’s eyes met the bagman’s. One cheekbone twitched. He shook his head. He waved the megaphone, his gesture encompassing not only the
bricks of the buildings, the gleaming windows, the chain of green lights that stretched on down the avenue, but also the crowds of people who were no longer there, and all the motivation for their haste. “N-n-n-none of it,” the preacher said, defeated, “N-n-none of this is real.”

  The bagman nodded. He was cautious: the preacher’s words could mean a lot of things. For instance, that though the particular shop windows and concrete curbs and squat blue mailboxes that surrounded them lacked real-ness, this failure was accidental, local, temporary, and other things in other places did possess that quality. Or that the matutinal haste and ant-like purposefulness of the gainfully employed was motivated by naught but stacked illusions. Or, solipsistically, that the preacher’s experience of his own consciousness was somehow more real, more substantial and valid and true than anything he perceived in his immediate surroundings. But it was also possible, the bagman realized, that he had found someone who shared his root ontological mistrust. So the bagman took a risk. He spoke. He sucked a breath in through his nostrils, knit his brow and pursed his lips as if the effort of speech required a full gathering of the resources scattered about his face.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “It’s l-like so much,” the preacher began, but then his tongue failed him and he almost had to spit to get the word out, “s-s-s-s-sand.” He held out his free hand and spread its fingers wide.

  “It falls right through,” the bagman said.

  The preacher nodded furiously. His glasses bounced on the bridge of his nose. The camera lenses clacked.

  “Like steam,” the bagman added, waving his own hand through the air.

  “Y-yes,” the preacher managed. “Like shit!”

  The bagman paused and swallowed hard. He scratched himself, raised his eyebrows, dropped them down. “I’ve seen him,” he said.

  The preacher frowned. “Who?” he asked.

  “Him.”

  “H-h-how do you know th-that it’s him?”

  The bagman crossed and uncrossed his legs. He indicated the bags behind him. “These belong to him.”

  The preacher’s blue eyes opened wide behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He looked at the bags, then at the bagman, and considered what he saw. “Where d-d-did you see him? Wh-wh-wh-where is he?”

  The bagman stood, straightening his trousers. “Saw him on the bus. Here. Near here. He left this morning. Can’t have gone too far.”

  A full course of twitching ran across the preacher’s chiseled face and down over the lumps of his throat. He asked the bagman which way, and the bagman pointed in the direction from which he had come. The preacher chewed his tongue. He smoothed his hair against his scalp. “I’m going to b-believe you,” he said, and then got rolling and raced hungrily from word to word, unsure how long he had, when the capacity for speech would desert him. “Y-y-you better not be bullshitting me,” he said, “I have no time for b-bullshit, no time for slacking off. I do things right or I d-don’t do them and I do them all the way. I’m n-nobody’s patsy and nobody’s fool. So don’t t-try and kiss me or slobber all over me and don’t p-p-put your hand on my upper leg, on my thigh or on my hip or my b-b-b-buttock, and think I’ll just leave it there. I don’t need a backrub at any time. I know which path is right and w-w-which is wrong. I’m here for one reason and one reason only and no one’s gonna keep me from it, so y-you got to act right. Consider yourself on p-p-probation, buster, consider yourself warned, no s-s-s-second chances, you g-g-got to c-carry your own weight around here.” Then without another stuttered syllable, the preacher twirled on his heel.

  The bagman regarded his bags ruefully and hoisted them again onto his back. The preacher, already ten paces ahead of him, walked with loping strides down the deserted street. The megaphone dangled on a strap from his bony wrist. Jogging to catch up, the bagman could just make out the words on the back of the sandwich board. They were written by hand in cramped cursive letters with a purple marker:

  Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament!

  Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp!

  Praise him with tambourine and dance!

  Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!

  He drops in on a friend.

  The subdivision crouched at the very peak of the highest hill around, but when he at last limped his way to the gate, the stranger was not winded. A stone wall had been built to protect the development from whatever evils lurked in the valley below, or at least to signify protection — it was too low to do much good. The guard shack at the entrance was abandoned, its windows coated with grime, and the gate itself, apparently once automated, had been derailed from its track. It lay rusting in the gravel. Only the camera affixed to the guard shack appeared to still be working. The stranger stepped past it, over the gate and into the curving streets. The houses were identical to one another, or nearly so, differentiated only by the varying strategies by which age and disrepair had conspired to render them unique. The red tile roofs were more and less intact. Some houses had been repainted, in whole or in part. Some had faded uniformly, while others did so in streaks, depending which side faced sun and which faced wind and rain. Most of the lawns had reverted to sand, but some here and there were better tended, and a few had been paved over, or strewn evenly with small white stones.

  The streets were empty. No cars drove by. No kids rode bikes. No one walked dogs or toddlers. The stranger did not spot a single soul until he came across a car parked at an odd angle to the curb, idling, blocking a driveway. In the front seat sat two teenage girls. Through the windshield, he watched as one kissed the other’s neck, hands tangled in her shortly cropped hair, rushing across her arms and breasts, clumsy with hunger. The eyes of the girl being kissed were closed. Her face was flushed, and a tear ran down her cheek. The stranger paused in front of the car. He took one step closer to the driver’s side door, and then another. His left eye ticced as he fingered the twine that bound his package. He untied it. The girl being kissed opened her eyes, saw him standing there, and pushed her lover from her. They looked at the stranger — whose hand had disappeared beneath the brown paper wrapping his parcel — and then at one another. The girls blushed and laughed, unaware of any danger. The short-haired girl dried her cheek with her wrist. “Cheap thrills,” she said without conviction to the stranger outside, “huh mister?” Then the one with longer hair put the car in drive, and they sped away.

  The stranger stood for a moment, his eye still ticcing. He reknotted the twine and limped on along the sidewalk. He crossed the asphalt on a diagonal. He turned one corner and then another before arriving at last at a wide cul-de-sac. In the front yard of the third house, a tall balding man pushed an electric lawnmower, bending now and again to keep from running over the orange power cord. He wore headphones, rimless glasses, faded cargo shorts, an undershirt. His work was easy, as the yard was mainly dirt.

  The house looked no better or worse than any of the others around, except for the black convertible sulking in the driveway, its top down, its paint immaculate. The stranger took a seat on the hood of the car, crossed his legs, and laid his package down beside him.

  The balding man pivoted the mower on one rear wheel and swiveled round to trim another row of sand. “Hello Michael,” the stranger said. “Impressive automobile.”

  Michael stopped. His face, flushed from the heat and the mild exertion required by his task, paled. He cut the power on the mower and hit the stop button on the tape player hooked to his belt.

  “I said, ‘Nice ride,’ ” the stranger said.

  Michael pulled the headphones from his ears, fumbled them, and let them dangle at his ankles by their cord. “How did you find me?” he coughed.

  “Michael,” the stranger clucked, grinning wide and tilting his head to one side. “Don’t insult me.”

  Michael didn’t smile back. “Please don’t sit on the car,” he said.

  The stranger contorted his face, twisting his lips, his
voice artificially high: “Pleasedontsitonthecar.” He didn’t move. He sighed. “I’ve come a long way to see you, Michael. Why don’t you offer me a drink. A nice cold soda pop.”

  Michael shook his head. “You can’t go in the house. There’s a hose around the side if you’re thirsty.”

  The stranger scoffed. “A hose around the side? Why do you hurt me, Michael?”

  “Why did you come here?”

  The stranger smiled with exaggerated pain and lowered his eyes. “I hear you’re in school,” he said.

  Michael nodded. “I finish in May,” he said. “You can’t stay here.”

  “And that you have a lovely wife.”

  “She’s not here. And you can’t meet her.”

  The stranger shook his head again. He rapped the windshield with his knuckles. “And such a handsome vehicle.”

  “A wedding present. My father-in-law. Please get off it now.”

  The stranger did not move. Instead he pointed to Michael’s cassette player. “What were you listening to?” he asked.

  “Bar review,” answered Michael, blushing.

  The stranger nodded. “Very nice. Bar review. What a delightful little life you have.”

  “I like it,” Michael said.

  “Of course you do.”

  The two of them regarded one another — Michael, standing stiff before his mower, still gripping its handle, the stranger seated on the convertible’s hood, his legs crossed and his arms crossed too, his thumb pressed against his chin, peering at Michael with one brow cocked above the other.

  Michael spoke. “I don’t want you here.”

  The stranger laughed, a harsh little rumble from deep in his gut. “You’ve made that clear,” he said. “I’m not going to try to convince you that I could give you so much more than this, whatever this is that you’ve settled for, that you’ve chosen to aspire to. That would not be worth my while. I wonder though — does she know, your wife? Does she know what you once had? Have you told her all the things you used to do? Does she worry that she can’t compete with such a past? The poor thing is probably scared to death that you’ll get bored of her, that you’ll just up and leave this dusty little house one day. Because she must know how easy it would be for you to pick up where you left off, after a little effort anyway. Because it would be easy, Michael. We could have it all again. She must be really something, that little gal of yours. Or maybe it’s the car that holds you back.”