Ether (13 page)

“What's so important?” I ask him.

Spacing the words for emphasis, or perhaps from fatigue, he repeats his question: “Are you going to tell me anything?”

I smile, shake my head. “I'm tired,” I tell him. “The rain used to help me sleep, but it doesn't lately. It used to knock me right out, the pitter patter of it. Like those tapes people buy to help them relax so that they can uncover their hidden potential, get promotions and whatnot, do good in school.”

He interrupts, “Are you going to
tell
me anything?”

A bird wakes up a block away and sings despite the drizzle. Or maybe it's a car alarm. “That's all I've been doing,” I say. “You just don't notice. You don't notice anything.”

He tries to laugh but it sounds more like he's swallowed something wrong. “So I should thank you,” he says. “All of this is for my benefit. For my betterment.”

“No,” I tell him. “Don't flatter yourself. It's not about you anymore.”

He laughs for real this time, a strange, broken, falsetto chortle, like someone whistling through a sieve. He's hugging his ribs and I can tell that each convulsion hurts him.

“I'll tell you a story if you'd like.”

“Aren't you doing that already?” he asks.

“Fine. I'll tell you a joke instead. This priest gets colitis. It's awful, diarrhea all the time, blood and mucus in the stool, constant pain. He tries everything, special all-broccoli diets, steroids, fasting, disgusting herbal remedies, acupuncture, yoga, everything, then finally the doctor tells him he has no other options, he'll have to have his colon surgically removed.”

The stranger groans. He looks so awful sitting there, dripping, that I almost feel bad for him. “Okay,” I say. “Forget the priest. I'll tell you the story.”

“Just tell me how it ends,” he says.

“Don't be silly,” I tell him. “Nothing ends. Now listen.” I clear my throat, and I tell this story:

“Once upon a time there was a little boy. He was never born, but was always a little boy. It never occurred to him that he should regret this — who remembers his own birth, much less what came before it? The little boy was lonely, though, as we all are lonely. That he did regret. To shake off the grasp of solitude, he taught himself to build things. He built castles out of young, green twigs, cities out of chewing gum, bottle glass and sand, whole planets out of fish scales, clay and rubber bands. He tossed his planets in the air sequentially and blew at them one by one out of the corner of his mouth until they spun in wide ellipses round his head.”

The stranger interrupts me. “So I'm this little boy?” he asks.

“No,” I tell him. “You're not a little boy. You're a scared old man. Now listen.

“The little boy felt no less alone for all his tricks, so he undertook to build himself a friend. He collected the feathers that he found stuck beneath tangled, reaching tree roots or caught shivering in the tall reeds around ponds. He stretched the feathers into wings. He balled rubber cement between his palms to form a breast, two thighs, a head. He found a sharp, hinged seashell for a beak, two small black seeds for eyes. He built a bird.

“With his little boyish breath held tightly in his lungs, the little boy kissed the tiny feathers he had woven over the bird's rubber cement scalp. He giggled when it warmed his hands and shook itself to life. Delight flooded his eyes. But the bird flew away. He could not follow.

“Sadness curled the little boy's heart. The sky dimmed. The air grew cold. The plants ceased growing. Their leaves dried and fell to the ground around the little boy, who lay there in the dirt, his fingers still sticky with rubber cement, unable to convince himself to stand. For the length of a season, the little boy mourned the bird and the sun barely dared to show itself.”

“I don't like this story,” the stranger says.

“It's not over yet,” I tell him, and go on. “Eventually the air warmed and the boy remembered the pleasure of the sun's heat on his limbs. He stood. He stretched. He even smiled at the clouds.

“The little boy decided to build himself a fish. He crafted fish bones out of twist ties and dental floss, filled them out with river mud, and stretched around it all a bolt of purple sequined cloth. For eyes he used smooth pebbles he found along the shore, for gills the blue plastic heads of twin-bladed razors. He cut his thumb on one, and smeared the blood along the fish's belly. He held his breath and kissed its head. The fish wriggled between his palms. He laughed aloud. He ran to the shore, stripped to his shorts, and with the fish in one hand, dove into the sea. A wave knocked him over. The fish swam away. He held his breath and watched as it shimmied off into the blue.

“His sadness grew. To be lonely because you've always been alone is one thing. To be left behind is quite another. The earth grew cold again. The boy wept, and for a while everything that lived died or slept as if it had died. At last the boy dried his eyes and rose again, determined. Saplings grew, and flowers, and green shoots, and it was once again possible for the boy to imagine that he would not always be alone.

“He spread a piece of white carpet across a rock and filled it with toothpicks and wire and knotted thread. He made a rabbit. It hopped away. With a soggy towel, umbrella spines and shards of broken crockery he built a dog. It jumped from his arms. He grabbed its tail. It bit his fingers and ran off. He built a little girl out of blender blades, soft bread, green moss, and styro­foam. He stroked her rayon eyelids and kissed her beachglass eyes. She took one quick and hungry breath, then kissed him back. Then she pushed him to the ground and skipped away, singing to herself. By the time he had brushed himself off to give chase, the little girl was gone.

“Sometimes, in the long night that followed her departure, the little boy thought he heard her voice again, her weird, wordless song. He could feel her rough lips pressed once more against his own. And the whole world shivered with his solitude.”

“That's it?” the stranger coughs, and coughs again.

“No,” I say. “But it's late. I'll finish later. Good night.” And I leave him there on my porch, bent like a clothespin, wheezing into the space between his knees.

Hours passed before the stranger stirred. When at last he opened his eyes, the rain had stopped and the clouds had gone away. He pushed himself up on his side. He tried to spit, but something clogged his mouth. The sun lazed low in the sky, bathing half the world in pink while the other half reclined in shadow. The mud shone like barroom neon. Plastic bags rustled in the breeze. A hummingbird twitched from bush to bush. Birds sang to one another about topics of concern to birds. A few feet from the stranger's head, a spider dangled from a strand of silk, weaving itself a home among the weeds, its web shimmering a day-glo shade of orange. A beetle scaled a stalk of grass, while beneath it one thousand ants marched off in single file. Life delighted in life, but the stranger could not see it. He coughed up a clot of black blood and had no choice but to swallow it back down. He closed his eyes again.

When he woke, the sun was gone. It had not been replaced by the moon. The sky was black and blue and sometimes purple and if you looked at it hard enough it would turn other colors too. The stars — how can I begin to tell you about the stars? How many hairs are on your head, on your arms and on your legs? Count them if you can. How many have you already shed in the course of your life and how many more will you yet sprout? Count the ones in your ears, in your nostrils, on your toes and the backs of your arms. Count the ones between your legs as well. There were more stars still in the sky above the stranger, each one otherwise incomparable to hair, burning and bedazzling, as if the dark of night were the bagman's holey blanket stretched across the sky to hide a single flame, and each star just a pinpricked fragment of that blaze, with every wink and flicker begging the question: Why all this hiding? Why night at all? Why this filth and darkness? Why not just light and flame?

The stranger tried to rise, but lacked the strength, and fell back into the cold and sticky mud.

Fine lines forked from the woman's eyes, and dug across her brow, but the eyes themselves were wide, and green, and youthful still. She dampened a cloth in a dented saucepan, and wiped the dirt and blood from the stranger's beard. His suit was a suit no more, so torn and begrimed that it could not even generously be termed a rag. She peeled it from his body and threw it in the fire. She washed him from callused sole to matted crown, and the water in her improvised washbasin went brown five times with the muck she wiped from his flesh, and five times she dumped the pan out empty in the bushes, refilled it at the drainage pipe, and again heated the water to a boil over the flames.

He endured this cleansing without complaint. He muttered something now and again, and if you had been there to hear him or if the woman who rescued him had been able to hear at all, you and she would have heard the words “now,” “hereafter,” and “I,” as well as many words you and she had never heard before, and many sounds that might have been words or cries or just harrumphs, you and she would never know.

Every few hours his eyes opened wide and frenzied and the woman jumped back in fright. Once his hand leapt forth and grabbed her by the wrist, the flesh of her arm at the same time plump and saggy. He pulled her close, but then his grip weakened and his eyes blinked shut as stupor washed over him again. The bruise on her wrist showed for days. Still, when the sweats came on, she wiped his brow with a moistened cloth, and when the shivers followed she swaddled him with blankets, with balled-up sweatshirts and unmatched woolen stockings, with everything she had. She covered his body with her own, as if hoping thereby not only to warm him but to absorb his convulsions, to pull them into her.

On the second day he woke long enough to drink some water, and when later, unconscious again, urine trickled down his thigh, she rolled him over and changed his bedding — piled strata of cast-off clothes laid in a roughly human shape on the dirt floor of her small shack. She left him for a while and came back with her pockets full. She brought a yellow onion, a wedge of cabbage, four limp stalks of celery and most of a baked potato, smeared with sour cream and crumbled bacon and wrapped in crumpled foil. She boiled it all into soup and when his eyelids next clicked open, she shoved a spoon between his lips. He spat the soup out, splattering her face. He jerked the spoon from her hand and hurled it off against the wall. Then his eyes clouded, and he rolled onto his side and slept.

On the third day, the stranger sat up. He tossed the blankets from his chest. She sat across the shack from him, her elbows on her knees, her heavy cheeks squeezed between her palms. The single room was illuminated by a burning wick in a half-filled bowl of kerosene. He gazed around at the leaning walls, one of green, corrugated fiberglass, one of sheet metal, two of warping particleboard. He stared into the lens of the scavenged camera that she had mounted on the wall above his head. No wire connected it to anything. The device watched and recorded nothing, but it made her feel less alone. He looked at her sitting on the floor before him, at the four skirts she wore one atop the other, the layered shirts on top. She wore three pairs of socks and two of stockings, but no shoes. He stared down at his own bare chest.

“Where is my suit?” the stranger said.

The woman did not answer. “My suit?” he asked again.

She shook her head, placed one finger on her lips and another on her ear, and shook her head once more.

The stranger nodded. “Dumb,” he said. “You're dumb.”

He ran his fingers over his chest and arms to indicate the absent garment, but the woman showed no sign of understanding. She stood, and retrieved from the surface of a small and wobbly table the bowl of soup, and the recovered spoon. She knelt beside him.

“No,” he said, and waved her off. “Just go away.”

That night she slept beside him, her fingers resting between the furrows of his ribs.

The three of them kneeled around it in the dirt. “Looky looky,” said the tall and skinny, pawing gently at the thing. The short and fat slapped his hand away. He cleared his throat. “Humbly, I take it upon myself to do the honors,” he said, and tugged at the end of the string that bound what had until recently been the stranger's most treasured possession, the material form of his most desperate hopes.

“Hold on now,” said the tall and fat. With meaty fingers, he grabbed the short and fat's wrist. “It's not your turn.”

The short and fat stared at the hand that gripped his tattooed arm with exaggerated amazement, then shifted his gaze to his comrade's squinting eyes. “What's that there?” he asked “On my wrist? Squeezing me like that? Some kind of octopus, I think. A filthy squid. And us so far from the sea. I can't imagine how it got here.”

The tall and skinny giggled. “Squid,” he said.

“It's my turn,” the tall and fat repeated, tightening his grip.

“It seems to be attached to your arm,” the short and fat went on. “I can help you with that.” With his left hand he pulled the straight razor from a back pocket of his jeans. He flicked it open. “Just hold still.”

The tall and fat grinned wide. “My brother,” he cooed. “You will eat that razor. I will carve Xs in your eyes.”

“Maybe not so wise,” the tall and skinny nodded in solemn agreement.

The short and fat let go of the string that wrapped the package and he and the tall and fat both slowly stood. The tall and fat's fat fingers still encircled the short and fat's fat arm. The razor glinted in the lamplight. Their eyes locked. They stepped in slow circles, dancing stiffly, motionless from the waist up. The package remained on the ground between them so that they resembled terrible, misshapen moons orbiting the same dull sun. A single eager, half-demonic grin contorted both their faces. They whispered words of love.

“Come on then,” said the short and fat. “Come closer.”

“Touch me,” said the tall and fat. “Just once.”

The tall and skinny crouched and waited as they turned until the moment came that neither of his comrades stood between him and the package. The tall and skinny took his opportunity. He scooped up the package, hooted, and wheeled about on his heel. But before he could lope away, the tall and fat and short and fat were on him. The tall and fat dove and swept his legs out with one huge extended arm. The short and fat hit him like a cannonball. The tall and skinny clattered to the ground. He lay there like a broken spider, his long limbs splayed at curious and unnatural angles. The tall and fat jumped on his back and yanked his arm up between his shoulder blades. The short and fat grabbed him by one earlobe, tugged his head up and held the razor to his throat.

“You've forgotten,” he said into the tall and skinny's stretched, translucent ear. “You're not the smart one.”

Just then the wind picked up. Something rustled across the dirt in front of them. All three looked up at once. It was the package. It had flown from the arms of the tall and skinny and landed a few yards off. It had come untied. The string lay flaccid on the ground. The oil-stained brown paper blew crumpled through the grass. It was empty. The three men leaped to their feet. They scoured the earth around them. They couldn't believe it. They looked everywhere, but all they found was rocks and dirt, broken bottle glass, fine, gray ash and sand.

When I open the door to my office, the stranger's sitting there. He's at my desk, in my chair. His suit is gone. He's wearing just a blanket. He doesn't look much better, but he's dry and most of the blood is gone. My papers, which I had left in neat stacks on my desk, have been scattered all around the room. They're crinkled and torn, as if a parade had just passed through. The stranger leans and retrieves a sheet from off the floor. He reads aloud, his voice striving for ridicule but too weak to pull it off. “Why all this hiding?” he scoffs. “Why night at all? Why this filth and darkness?” His fingers tremble as he tears the page in half. He pulls another page from the mess at his feet and reads, “It's okay baby wake up baby it's okay.”

I take the page from his hand, smooth its creases with my thumb. “How long have you been here?” I ask.

“Long enough,” he says.

“You do know, don't you, that I can always print another copy?”

He swivels around to face me. “I want to see the end.”

“I haven't written it.”

“Tell it to me.”

I take off my jacket, hang it on the hook on the back of the door. “Get off my chair,” I say.

To my surprise, he does. With a modesty that is almost touching, he gathers the blanket around him, stiffly stands. His legs are pale and hairless and marbled with welts. He looks like a cartoon stork. Papers crumple beneath him as he lowers himself, hunching, onto the couch. “Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” I say.

“The little boy?” he sniffs.

“Yeah, the little boy.”

“That's not the story I was talking about.”

“I'm afraid you don't have a choice,” I say. I begin where I left off:

“When at last the little boy roused himself again, he did not feel hope, but anger. He took no joy this time from the warmth of the sun, finding in it only a dim, more distant likeness of the rage that burned within him. How dare the little girl desert him? How dare the bird, the fish, the rabbit, the dog, all the creatures he had kissed to life?

“He gathered thorns, nails, tacks, rusted and serrated blades, razor wire, hard and pointed stones, ground glass, barrels of bubbling industrial waste. With these he built a shark. He spat upon its head and sent it off to chase the fish. He built a hawk to fall upon the rabbit. He cursed it to life and with a flutter of feathers hurled it in the air. He built a snake, filled its teeth with poison, and kicked it down the path where the little girl might skip and the dog might curl itself to sleep. Just in case, he built a man and a woman. He slapped and spat them awake, bid them wreck whatever the others chanced to miss. He built a vulture so as not to leave a mess.

“Exhausted by his efforts, the little boy laid down beneath a tree to rest. But his heart would not slow. Even when he closed his eyes, he saw the branches above him thrashing in rhythm with his pulse. In fact the tree was still. The wind sang softly through the grass, but all the little boy could hear was shrieking, gnashing, tearing. He picked at the grass, twisted it into rope, tore the rope, twisted the tearings into a cord again. Repeat.

“Sleep fled before him as everything else had. Wakefulness had lost what little charm it held. He shook the leaves from his clothes. If he could find only displeasure here, perhaps elsewhere he might find rest. Or something like it. Some variety of relief. Perhaps, it occurred to him, as he let his feet fall one after the other, he had not given his creations a chance. Perhaps they had been playing. Perhaps they had run, intending that he give chase. Perhaps they were wondering where he was, feeling as injured by his absence as he was by theirs. Perhaps. Insomnia weakens the workings of the mind. But it allowed the little boy to indulge in a species of optimism that gave purpose to his wanderings. Perhaps, he consoled himself, he would find what he had lost, and be welcomed by it.”

The stranger's eyes have closed. He lets himself fall slowly onto his side and rests his head on the arm of the couch. He pulls his blanket up to his beard. My papers, these pages, lie crumpled all around him.

“I'll finish later,” I say.

He speaks without opening his eyes. “Are you trying,” he asks, “to tell me something?”

The stranger tried to walk. His rescuer stood beside him, one hand on his elbow, the other around his back. “Don't. Touch. Me,” he hissed. But she could not hear him, and after three steps, he let himself lean into her and limped onward with her support, adding another hissed
don't-touch-me
as he did.

He made it out the door and a few feet outside the shack before he stumbled. His legs were not the problem. His ribs were broken, his organs bruised; he grew weaker with each step. The woman caught him and lowered him in her arms to the ground. The stranger lay there naked on the dirt, and before she could bend to drag him back inside to bed, he was able to crane his head around and see where he had landed.

The deaf-mute's shack sat on a small plateau of level earth midway up the slope between the railroad tracks below and a concrete embankment just up the hill. A cement overpass provided shelter from the elements, and the woman's dwelling was protected on all sides by tangled shrubbery — the skeletal remains of oleanders long-since cannibalized by kudzu. A wan poinsettia protruded from a flowerpot beside the door. Dried and wilted flowers lay in heaps. Rank upon rank of plastic baby dolls guarded the hovel — some pink, some brown, most nude but some dressed in soiled jumpers, some with hair and some without, others without heads but still standing on alert, their feet planted in the soil. Behind this plastic phalanx, other goods lay piled: blenders and toasters, a vacuum cleaner and two broken-screened TVs, the backseat from a Ford, a plush giraffe, more flowerpots, all empty, a sombrero'd Mexican lawn jockey with a cracked ceramic beer mug foaming in his hand. Off to the right a drainage pipe projected from the hillside, and from its lip water dribbled forth. An iron grill sat atop a circle of blackened bricks and concrete blocks a few feet in front of the car seat, still smoking from the night before.