Ether

Copyright © 2011 by Ben Ehrenreich

All Rights Reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ehrenreich, Ben.

Ether / Ben Ehrenreich.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-87286-518-1

I. Title.

PS3605.H738E84 2011

813
'
.6—dc23

2011029377

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

www.citylights.com

for Oso

Would that I knew how to reach Him,

How to get to His dwelling place.

I would set my case before Him,

And fill my mouth with arguments.

Job 23:3-4

Whenever I searched for myself I found

the others. Whenever I searched for the others I found

only my stranger self in them,

so am I the one, the multitude?

Mahmoud Darwish, “Mural”

The sun had long ago set. There was no moon, and the earth was dark. Yet the sky was thick with stars. It was thick too with clouds. The stars circled above them and reeled about the sky. Their light though, for all its will and whimsy, was too weak to be seen from beneath.

The woods also were dark, and the dry fields. Tall yellow lamps lit the highway every fifty yards. From above it looked like nothing more than a long bare necklace of sulfured bulbs, too straight and regular for any constellation. From below it looked like a highway, yellow-tinged. An empty, two-lane, late-night highway. Every third or fourth streetlamp was dark, its bulb shot out by an air gun or a slingshot. There the world was dim. Stars are not so easily extinguished.

But even there, the world was bright with smell and sound — the harsh, dusty smell of the blacktop, the sour mulchy odor of beer cans rotting in the woods, and every now and then the drunk sweetness of datura flowers hanging in trumpets unseen in the dark. Even in the utmost gloom, the world was blinding bright. If you listened, you could hear the wind blow in sudden and uneven fits. Leaves shivered and the dry grass swayed. A crumpled envelope raced across the asphalt. A plastic bag escaped from the low scrub that had ensnared it, leapt free into the breeze but was just as soon caught by a leaning thistle. It jerked and snapped in protest. Beneath it a cricket's forewings sang in expectation. Beetles clacked their jaws. Weevils crunched away at wood. Blood thumped in a bullfrog's brain. Bats winged between the trees. In the dark as in the light, the whole world ate, and hoped to mate.

Spiders snared flies, which ceased to buzz. Owls tore at the hearts of field mice, which ceased to peep. High in a tree and without a sound, a snake swallowed a pale blue egg before it could hatch into a bird. The spider, the owl, the snake — they all delighted. Living things delight in life. Most of them do. Cells divide, and divide again. We mate that our offspring may mate, and eat that our children may eat. So we're told. Blood enriches the soil. The stars shine on above the clouds. This is not an excuse for anyone.

Not for me and least of all for the stranger who walked beneath the yellow streetlamps beneath those clouds beneath the stars, his feet falling one after the other on the gravel at the side of the road. One foot crushed a colony of ants, but he did not appear to notice. The other foot kicked the muddied brown neck of a beer bottle from his path. Mosquitoes bit at his ankles, but he did not slap them away.

His feet stamped on, rising and falling past trees and the stumps of trees, past a discarded refrigerator laid out on its back, its doors hanging open like the wings of some narcoleptic angel, a family of possums breeding in its belly. His feet trudged on past a stray tricycle, past a fire station with windows boarded, no flag on its pole. They didn't pause, didn't slow when he passed a silent clapboard shack and didn't quicken when a dog ran out from behind the shack to howl at him, ears flapping and tail on point. He walked past that dog and past the shadow of a cat a few yards farther down. In another house the lights shone with stubborn joy. Music and laughter leaked out through a broken screen. He kept walking, and did not whistle or mutter or hum. No one marked his passage. Not a single car drove by.

He passed sparse rows of darkened houses followed by stretches a half mile long of waste and woods. The houses leaned against the wind. Dreams circled inside them. Clocks ticked. Dust settled where it could. Insomniacs gripped their sheets. In other groaning houses, their rooftops straining toward the ground, drunks drank at kitchen tables, big sisters whispered to little sisters beneath the blankets covering them, mice dared to race across living room floors, lovers nestled heads on lovers' shoulders. None troubled themselves to notice the gaunt figure that hiked along outside their homes, to wonder who he was and what he wanted, or where his feet would lead him.

They led him at last to a gravel parking lot a mile from any structure save the one it fronted, a low box of a building with a red neon light glowing in its single blackened window. Three cars shared the lot with a green and rusted dumpster. The door, painted a thick and high-gloss brown, trembled slightly to the rhythm of the music within. The stranger stopped, paused a moment just beyond the neon glow, glared hard at the video camera above the door, and slapped the dust from his ankles. He crossed the lot, grabbed the knob, and stepped into the light.

I feel I owe you some kind of explanation. An introduction. A preface or prologue of some sort. We haven't met, and I am, after all, imposing.

I live in a small house on a low hill on a short street in a large city. I don't live alone. A woman lives here with me. You won't get to meet her, but she and I sleep side by side on the same lumpy, queen-size mattress in the bedroom in back. She sleeps on the inside, usually on her side but sometimes on her stomach. I sleep on my back, like a corpse I am told, though I do not cross my arms over my chest. I also sleep poorly, and get up often in the night, so I sleep on the outside. I get up and empty my bladder and fill it again with water. Or with whiskey if it's that kind of night. Which tonight it is. I stand barefoot in the kitchen on the cold linoleum until the glass is empty and my throat warm and I can go back to bed. The floor in the hallway is gritty beneath my feet. It needs sweeping, scrubbing. I'll get to it one day.

I pull back the covers and lie listening to her whistling breath, the pace and pitch of it shifting with her dreams. I close my eyes and squeeze them until I see stars. Not really stars, but you know what I mean, as close a substitute as I can hope for. Then I open my eyes and the stars go away. Over the years, we've decorated the walls with posters and photos and prints (Is this straight? Raise the right corner just a smidge. A little lower. There.), but each night the shadows erase all our choices and remake the room according to their own penumbral whims. With the help of the moon, the streetlamps, the headlights and brake lights of each car that drives by, and the on-and-off-again red pinprick light of the video camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling, the shadows keep at it all night long. I lie awake and watch them playing, shifting and stretching, hiding and revealing, changing shape and color, chasing one another from wall to wall.

I can't see them, but I know there are stars above my roof, real ones, up there above the pebbled stucco ceiling and the dark attic I've never crawled inside and the crumbling roof tiles and the overhanging trees and telephone wires and the clouds above them. And there are more stars above those. I count on that, even if the ceiling and the roof and the clouds and the smog and the lights of the city mean that I can rarely see more than one or two of them. They were here before me, the stars, and they'll be here after me, and on nights like this one that's a comfort. But those other stars you read about just now, that mute sky, those woods and fields and sulfured bulbs, the bullfrog and the bats — I built them. Or at least I named them, which amounts to the same thing. I wrote their names, and called them into being. Quite a trick. That street, that sky, this page too and the white between these words, I made them for you. And for myself, because I am selfish, and because I am trying to make sense of things.

Forgive me if I'm too abstract, but I am struggling with a conundrum. That conundrum is this world. What is in it. What is not. Mainly what is not. And in that absence — in the knot, if you will, of what is not — what to do with what there is. How to look upon it so that it is not entirely painful. I'll be more specific later. I'll try to anyway, because without you these pages are just pulp, but with you they might begin to form, if not an answer, at least a statement of the problem. An alternate phrasing of the conundrum itself. And that, I hope, might be the beginning of a way out. Better put, of a way in. A way through. For me at least, and perhaps for you as well.

You'll forgive me if I don't start at the beginning. That was too long ago, and hard to pin down. We don't have time. I don't anyway. Besides, taking the long view, nothing really begins, just like nothing ever ends. The cosmos a snake with its tail in its throat, or a turtle sitting atop a turtle, and turtles all the way down. But I have to start somewhere, so it might as well be here, on the hard, slow shell of this old turtle and no other, on this night in particular, here beneath the clouds beneath the dancing stars not in my bedroom anymore but in this gravel parking lot. Wind blowing, trees whispering to trees. A camera humming as it watches from its perch above the door. We left him in mid-stride, his long fingers curled around the doorknob, twisting to the left and to the right, tugging that cold, bronze knob toward him, lifting one foot and then the other, and stepping inside the bar.

He was tall, with the kind of face you look at once and don't forget, and eyes that burn right through you. His flesh was unlined by age, but his beard was gray and his long and matted hair the same color, perhaps a few shades yellower. He wore a tattered suit that looked to have once been white, but had been spattered, no, crusted, with stains of nearly every color, though mostly a sort of rusted brown. The stains barely showed in the neon dim.

The jukebox in the corner spouted brittle, optimistic pop music, but the bar was nearly empty. A few abandoned balls littered the torn felt of the pool table and like them, the few people in the bar stuck to their positions, intent, apparently, on ignoring one another. The bartender crouched on a stool at the end of the bar, studying the comic book folded on his knees. A man in a John Deere cap snored across from him, the hairs of his long mustache swaying in a puddle of beer with each whistled exhalation. A fat woman in a mini-skirt hugged the jukebox and bobbed with eyes closed to the beat of a song other than the one that the machine was playing. A bald man with no eyebrows and a slight trace of eyeliner conversed intently with an ashtray. “No,” the bald man said. “Fuck if I know.”

The stranger took a stool near the door beside a slender woman with weathered skin and busy, drink-blurred eyes. She jumped a bit when he sat down. Hooking a lock of hair behind one ear, she bit her lip and then released it into a bright, scared smile. The stranger ordered a Coca Cola. The woman beside him slid a cigarette out of the pack on the bar in front of her. She looked his way, then consulted the palm of her hand as if hoping to find her lines cribbed there. She tapped her painted nails on the bar, took a deep breath, and spoke. “Got a light?”

The stranger nodded toward the plastic lighter that sat beside her cigarettes. “Oh,” she said. “How silly. Silly me.”

The woman pushed her hair from her eyes and scratched at the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “My name's Marty,” she said, and extended a pale, long-fingered hand for him to shake. Her voice, for all its quivering, was as sunny as anything could be in the heavy gloom of the bar. “It's Martha, really, but nobody calls me that 'cept my mom when she's not calling me something nasty.”

She giggled, embarrassed. He took her hand and nodded, but said nothing in return.

Marty sucked on her cigarette and blew a wide cone of smoke from one corner of her mouth. She scratched her nose and tried again. “You're not from around here,” she said. “Are you?”

The stranger sipped at his cola. “I am,” he said, smiling tightly. “From here. Here and pretty much everywhere.”

“You must've been here way back then, cause I never seen you, and I know just about everyone.”

Marty laughed. Together they listened to her laughter fade and fall before he spoke. The ice in his soda crackled as it melted.

“Yes,” he said. “Way back.”

Marty took a short breath and, already blushing, gave his knee a light, experimental slap with the back of her hand. “Wash you up a little and you'd be cute as a kitten,” she beamed. “You got those matinee eyes.”

He twisted his beard into one long thin braid, looked up at her from beneath bushy white eyebrows, and returned her smile.

She stared at her lap. She suddenly looked very tired, as if the gloom of the bar had seeped beneath her defenses, extinguishing what little cheer she had struggled to ignite. Her voice was thin and weak when she spoke again. “You gonna ask me if you can buy me a drink?”

He asked, and she consented. He paid with crumpled bills, and tipped the bartender with a handful of change. Her drink arrived in a tall, fluted glass, with a wedge of orange and a pink paper umbrella on its rim. She emptied it in three long gulps, sucked the orange from its rind, and wiped her mouth on her wrist. The drink seemed to revive her. “I'll tell you,” she said, twirling the umbrella between her thumb and forefinger, “You're lucky you got outta this town, cause it is dead.” She spelled it. “D-E-A-D, dead.”

He smiled again, more warmly this time. “Looks like there's a little life in it yet.”