Ether (14 page)

“Quite a grand estate you have,” the stranger began to say. Before he could finish the phrase, though, as if in response, the dolls all turned to face him. Or seemed to turn, it's hard to say — the stranger wasn't feeling well. The dolls stood at attention, straightening what spines they had (none really) and clicking together their fat, naked heels, though the effect, since they were plastic, was more soft thud than click. Each kicked out a right leg, then a left. They goose-stepped solemnly in place. Pudgy ankles rising, falling, here and there catching glints of sun. Those that had heads held their heads high. Each doll reached to the doll beside it. They partnered off, clasping one hand straight out in front and placing the other in the very small small of their partners' plastic backs. They tangoed as elegantly as broken and discarded dolls can tango, filing off pair by pair and dancing, arms extended, in straight lines towards the stranger, stopping just out of his reach, twirling their hips, switching hands and dancing back. When all had had a chance, the dolls decoupled. Stiff-legged, they marched in place, showing him the soles of their varyingly booted and unbooted feet. The stranger groaned. The dolls all curtsied. The woman, smiling, lifted the stranger from beneath the arms to pull him back inside. Did she see what the stranger saw? Did dead things come alive for him alone? To salute him or to mock him? Was it the deaf-mute's doing? Did anyone see it but he and you and I? It's hard to say. The stranger's eyes were shut. He bit his lip, and let himself be pulled.

Searching, they found nothing but searchers. They walked all day every day. They asked all those they came across if they had seen the man in the ragged white suit. Usually the old man asked because words came to him most easily. Too easily, sometimes, and with too many other words attached. “You haven't seen him, huh? Too bad. Maybe not for you, though, right? Maybe okay for you. Cause really, who's fool enough to want to encounter such an individual, besides my companions here, and my sorry old self?”

They met two crippled twins outside a bowling alley who shook their heads in unison and wheeled along beside them. The twins required no convincing, no long explanations. They seemed to know what the men were looking for before they even asked. Or maybe not. Perhaps they were looking for something completely different, a buried treasure, misplaced keys or a kidnapped terrier, and their path happened to coincide precisely with that of the bagman, the old man and the preacher. No matter, they were searching too.

They met a long-haired teenage girl carrying a yellow-nozzled red plastic gas can. It was empty. Her car had run out of fuel, and when the old man asked her to join them, she thought for a while, then shrugged and asked, “Why not?” No one had an answer for her, and she did not expect one, so none was good enough. They met an old prostitute in tennis shoes with a black eye and sagging knees. She had never seen no one never, she insisted, but then she tagged along a quarter block behind them. They met a small gang of boys in baseball caps and windbreakers who would not any of them answer the old man's queries, who just stood and gaped at them with fear and revulsion in their eyes.

They slept in alleys and beneath the hedges that limned the parking lots of malls. They took turns bathing in gas station restrooms. “A bird bath for a funny, funny bird,” the old man said, shaking the water from his hands and winking at the long-haired girl. “A funny flock of birds.” They ate at minimarts and at liquor stores where bulletproof dividers separated the merchants from their wares. The preacher bought individually wrapped donuts and styrofoam cups of instant soup, but never shared his meals. The bagman endured stern glares from the preacher for shoplifting frozen burritos. He thawed them beneath his sweater and gave everyone a piece. The old man always refused his share. He didn't seem to eat anything at all.

No one had seen the white-suited stranger, or would admit to having seen him. Deprived entirely of clues, his seekers had no reason to choose one direction over another, so they marched in concentric circles, in an unfolding spiral, to cover as much surface area as possible without having to commit to any single — and perhaps mistaken — bearing. Freeways got in their way, and gated lots, so they zigzagged where they had to. They spent two days following a man with an eye patch who told them he had received a coded message from the stranger on his transistor radio and knew precisely where he was, but who, when pressed for details would only sweep his arm broadly and shout, “Right over here, I'm telling you, right here.” A fat woman in a pink sweatsuit fell in with them. A cockatiel perched on her shoulder. “Think you're much?” the bird screeched every twelve minutes, morning and night, “Know you're living?” The long-haired girl threatened to strangle it, and the fat woman called her a skank. A three-legged greyhound trailed limping behind them, all ribs and half bald. The old man began lifting shrink-wrapped sandwiches and pre-sliced poundcake to feed it. Twice a police car shadowed them, cruising slowly behind them until without incident they crossed an invisible line dividing the municipality from the one that flanked it, at which point their pursuers lost interest in the chase.

Mainly they were silent. The preacher's sandwich board beat against his calves. The lenses strung around his neck rattled against the board and against one another. The bagman's bags rustled on his back. The wheels of the cripples' wheelchairs squeaked, and the two of them conversed in rare whispers in a language known only to one another. The bird squawked right on schedule. Their feet collected calluses and blisters and the soles of their shoes wore thinner as they plodded down the pavement, across the avenues, and through the broken fields.

Sometimes the old man whistled, and sometimes he talked. The preacher scowled when he approached. He took this as encouragement and, with a spark of mischief in his eye, started in. “I don't want you to take this wrong,” the old man began, “but have you ever considered another profession? I mean, something more suited to your strengths?” But the preacher could walk faster than the old man, and soon outdistanced him without a word in response.

Flushing the urinal in a QuickMart men's room, the old man chatted up the twins as they sat wheel to wheel, brushing their teeth before the sink. He pointed to the video camera mounted on the tiled wall above the mirror. “You ever wonder,” the old man said, “if anybody's watching?” The twins exchanged panicked glances. They looked at each other, at the camera, at the old man's reflection in the mirror. Someone had scratched the words “Sureños rifan putos” in the glass. “I don't just mean the cameras,” the old man continued. “Cause who could have time to watch all those things? It's hard enough to keep an eye on what's right in front of you. I'm talking about inside, inside your head. I mean who's watching there? Who's keeping track? Like when you say you don't know how you feel about something and you decide to listen to your thoughts, to keep an eye on yourself, who's doing the listening? Who's watching and who's being watched?” In unison, the twins shook their heads and spat toothpaste into the sink. “Everything keeps splitting in two,” the old man said. “Know what I mean?” As they wheeled out of the room without a word, the old man grinned. “Course you do,” he said.

He tried to tell the man with the eye patch a story about his wife. “She was not a small woman,” he began, “and I don't mean that she was fat, though she wasn't svelte. She was what they call big-boned, and tall to boot. First time I kissed her I made sure we were standing on a flight of stairs, and that she was three steps below me. Her tongue was the size of my whole face. I fell for her right there and then. I could climb her legs like trees. She'd cradle me like an infant in her arms. That's the kind of girl for me, you lay her down, you need a sextant and a clear sky to navigate your way across.”

The man with the eye patch hid his ear behind his radio and broke into a jog. The old man tried again to chat up the cripples but they just nodded and said things he didn't understand. The prostitute avoided him. The cockatiel talked, but it didn't seem to listen and it always said the same thing. Its owner was no better a conversationalist. “Oh no,” she'd say whenever she saw him coming, “don't you get me started.”

The old man winked at the long-haired girl and asked her why she'd joined them. “You're a pretty girl,” he said, “what're you running with these fools for?” She dug in her pack for a cigarette, but didn't answer. “Oh,” said the old man, raising his eyebrows. “I see how it is. Someone went and broke your heart.”

The girl's shoulders dropped a little. Her eyes fell to her feet, and the old man knew that he was right. His old man's heart felt heavy, and he wanted to tell her not to take it too hard, not to hold on to it too long or too tight. He wanted to warn her to get used to it, that love is not the substance of this world. Maybe of some other one. Here the planets spin on yearning. But instead he laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Don't worry kid. There's lots of fellas out there.” She shook him off and rushed ahead, hugging the empty gas can.

They walked all day, over steep, treeless hills, through weedy, smog-choked valleys. They followed the train tracks until a security guard chased them back into the streets. When at last they stopped to rest in the shade of an awning behind an empty warehouse, the old man crouched beside the bagman. The bagman pulled a piece of peanut brittle from a pocket, dusted off the lint, and offered it to the old man. The old man smiled gratefully, but shook his head. “You really seen him, huh?” he asked.

The bagman nodded, and took a bite.

“And you just knew it was him?”

The bagman nodded again.

“What was he like?” the old man asked.

The bagman considered the question carefully and took his time in answering. “Tall,” he said at last.

“I suppose he would be. He kind of acts more like a short guy though.”

“He wasn't short,” the bagman said. After a long while he spoke again. “He slept real bad.”

The old man grinned. “As well he should.” He shifted his weight from one knee to the other. “What do you think will happen,” he asked the bagman, “when you find him?”

The bagman looked around as if expecting to find the words he needed waiting on a tree branch or perched on the eaves of the warehouse roof. He couldn't find them.

“You can't help him,” the old man said. “You know that, don't you?”

“He's carrying too much stuff,” the bagman answered.

The old man gestured at the bagman's bags. “And you think you're the one to help him with that?”

The bagman's eyes scoured the pavement in front of him as if he might find an answer for the old man there. He scratched himself, and squinched his face, and when he finally opened his mouth to answer, the cockatiel cut him off.

“Think you're much?” it screeched, “Know you're living?”

The old man laughed, and the bagman almost smiled.

In the evening, the stranger lay on his back and watched the shadows chase one another about the walls as a breeze shook the wick of the lamp. The woman kneeled at his feet and watched him watch. His eyes turned to her, to the lamplight dancing across the rounded contours of her face. What she saw frightened her profoundly. It wasn't hatred, and it would be hard to call it cruel. It was a hunger that had nothing to do with her, to which her presence was so completely incidental that she felt herself in danger.

“Come here,” he said to her, and motioned her forward with one crooked finger. She pointed doubtfully to her breast, as if perhaps he were mistaken. The stranger nodded. “Yes, you.”

The woman's back was hunched with fear as she crawled on her knees to the stranger's side. He sat up, and gestured for her to lean closer to his face. “Here,” he said. “Come here.” She closed her eyes, and leaned in towards him. She was shaking. The stranger took the deaf woman's head between his hands and cupped his palms over her ears. “Hear,” he said. “Hear me.” He ran his fingertips down along her jaws and stuck the thumb and forefinger of each hand between her lips and into her mouth. She squirmed as he grabbed her tongue.

“Speak,” he said, yanking her tongue out past her teeth. “Hear me and speak.”

With his palm on her brow, the stranger pushed the woman from him. She fell back, and when she opened her eyes she regarded him at first with puzzlement. He had not hurt her. Then a grin crept across her face. With her mouth clamped shut to hide her broken teeth, she reached forward and cupped her own small palms over his ears. She waited a moment to see what he would do and, when he did nothing, she ran her fingers down through his white sideburns and beard. She stroked at his lips with the pads of her thumbs. They were cracked, his lips were, and bleeding still. She pulled them back and down so that he looked like a child making monkey faces. Devoid entirely of mockery, her grin stretched until it could grow no wider, then took living form as laughter, the first sound she had produced since the stranger's arrival, a sort of low and choking glee.

The stranger swatted her hands from his face and, with what little strength remained to him, he shoved the woman away. She skidded across the small, dark room. Her hair covered her face until she sat up, shook it off, and leaned her back against the quivering fiberglass wall, gagging and burbling and laughing still.

“Idiot,” the stranger barked.

Pigeon told his sisters nothing. They had begun to bug him, demanding that he tell them where he ran off to each morning. His older sister had noticed, though she did not mention this to Pigeon, that certain things about him had changed in the space of just two days. He did not kick every rock he came across, for instance, and he no longer circled every tree. He bobbed along undistracted in a more or less straight line. Maybe he had a girlfriend, the older sister speculated to the younger. The younger cackled and jumped at the hilarity of the thought: Pigeon kissing a girl. She stuck out her tongue and made her eyes go googly. Really though, it wasn't girls that worried Pigeon's older sister. Girls she could take care of. It was adults that worried her, and boys that liked to hurt things.