Ether (3 page)

“I need a favor, Gabriel.”

“Try someone else. I'm all out.”

“Just one last time. For old time's sake.”

“Forget it.”

“Thank you, Gabriel. I really mean that. I'll be there tomorrow. I won't forget this.”

“I said forget it,” Gabriel said. “It's over.” He hung up. The stranger hung up too, smiled to himself, and started off down the road.

Things were in crisis. The sun still shone. Daily it rose. Daily it set. The moon worked its circuit and also the stars. If you squinted your eyes, everything seemed all right. But things did not fit themselves. Though they continued to function as if nothing had changed. That was the worst of it. The bagman did not know how else to put it except that things no longer appeared to be contained by their own outlines. Ordinary things. Sidewalks, cars, what have you. They seemed too tight, too baggy, ill-meshed to one another, all bunched up. They sat wrong with themselves. The textures seemed false, the smells manufactured. The colors were off. Things appeared to mock themselves. Every single thing seemed an imperfect parody of its own essence.

It had not always been so. The bagman had not always been a bagman. That much he was able to acknowledge. He'd had a name once, though he no longer cared to recollect it. He had been a citizen of the most ordinary sort, an unquestioning believer in the thingness of things, in their coherence and singularity. He had shopped in shopping malls, gone to bed in a bedroom, dined, at times, in diners. He had worn ordinary clothes and smelled of ordinary soap. Pressed khakis. V-neck sweaters. Dove. Prell. But his life had been cleaved by an incident that he was only willing to let himself think of — and then cautiously, as if handling a bare wire that might be live, with steel pliers and wet hands — as The Incident. And the only thing that you or I will get to know about The Incident is that it happened, that it was done. Those two words contained for the bagman all the uncontainable enormity of the past tense. He used them to construct a shade with which to cover from view the actual event and the chain of events that followed it — the infinite, incomprehensible connections between them, the mute stupidity of time — a shade that served to hide all but the fuzziest contours of the bagman's pre-bag life. What had been, the bagman knew, no longer was. The Incident, like the astral phenomenon inaccurately called a black hole, sucked all he knew inside it and stranded him alone in the world, hollow and hungry, a bearded, malodorous, birth-defected newborn, lost and already slightly broken. Around the edges of that hole that was not a hole, the bagman felt a deep, thirsting anxiety, and something akin to guilt.

In better moods, he tried to laugh. He rarely drank, but when he did he found it easier. And by it, I mean, well, all of it. He could pretend it was a joke and that he was in on the joke. Pick up a pint of Karlov from the Korean man behind the plexiglass cage at the corner store, sip on a park bench, scratch his big, grey belly and toast the world, wink wink. Toast the squirrels and the ants and the cameras hidden in the trees and the weeds that grew in the cracks in the cement, widening the cracks, turning cement to sand, to dust. Toast the clouds and the wind and the birds that swam squawking from tree branch to tree branch, and the squawks that lingered in the pulsing space between the branches. Raise the bottle to the smell of jasmine in the springtime, the first-rain smell of fall, the smell of urine all year long. Toast the clicking of heels on the sidewalk, the hum of passing cars outside the park, the muttering and whispering of the men and women who had sat here yesterday and all the days before that, a child's voice somewhere behind him, the child's ball as it escaped the child's hands and bounced away down the concrete path

But the joviality was hard to sustain. There were too many things. They stared him down. Vodka can only get you so far. Invariably, it would cause him to fall asleep, a not so unpleasant outcome if it were not that he always eventually woke, and usually at some middle level of despair. Not quite the bottom floor — to which he felt no desire to return — but still much too near the basement. Mouth dry, head throbbing with questions: even if it was a joke, whose joke was it? More important, on whom? And joke or calamity, if a thing was no longer itself, if its skin had been somehow stretched or shrunk and altered, what was it? What was anything in this mad, sick blur? Could he rest his weight on this earth and know that it would bear him?

These questions, of course, do not pertain solely to the bagman. I don't mind admitting that they're mine as well — how else could I have known to write them, to attribute them to him? But the bagman, limited as he was by the four rounded corners of his skull, had no way of knowing this and tried on occasion to check in with others, to determine if he was alone in his concerns. He was not successful. Other people, he found, did not wish to speak with him. Approached, they scurried from him with mouths clamped shut. As if he were something contagious. (His code of dress, it should be said, did not conform to prevailing social norms. Nor, perhaps more crucially, did his approach to hygiene.) And even if people had stopped to listen, had opened themselves to him fully, the truth was that words fought him with even greater avidity than stone-mute things. They flitted between his ears like drunken moths, turning to vapor before he could force them through his mouth. If it cost him a near-Herculean effort to construct and impart the simplest declarative proposition, what hope could he have to convey such vast and metaphysical quandaries?

Nonetheless, he gathered evidence. He hoped for a tribunal, a chance to make his case. Before whom, he wasn't sure. Nor against whom. He planned to collect one of everything. That was his original intent. To make a comprehensive case. To be able to display at least one instance of every single thing, like Noah if Noah had herded all the beasts in the world up the gangplank and onto the ark for purposes of prosecution rather than preservation. As evidence. He was limited by finances, of which he had none. This restricted him to things found abandoned or which he could handily nick. And to things small enough to carry, as he had no secure abode of his own in which to store them.

Isn't this counterintuitive? Wouldn't he be moved to flee the things that menaced him, and not to hug them to him? Well it's hard to get away from things. Even in sleep, even in stupor, there they are, stubborn as your shadow. And the bagman, as you shall see, was a man of considerable courage. He dodged the past (if
dodge
is the right word for his careful self-immurement), but he flinched at nothing else. He ran bravely forward, if never back. He handled each of the objects he harvested as an exterminator treats a rat he's caught alive, with a thick admixture of revulsion, curiosity, and affection bred by bondage to a task.

He laid up his gleanings in big plastic trash bags and carried them with him everywhere. He filled one bag and then another. Three he could carry, but for more than that he needed a cart. Something existed in the makeup of police officers, he had learned, some broken neural switch, frayed fascicles perhaps, or a congenitally torn meninx: they did not like to see a man push a cart. Their reactions were unpredictable and tended toward extremes. It didn't matter. He quickly found that there was insufficient regularity even among things of any given category — socks, for instance, or rubber bands — to justify his original ambition. He could argue his case just as effectively if his body of evidence consisted entirely of rubber bands, every rubber band being distinct from every other rubber band and all of them, every single one, failing in some inchoate but nonetheless essential manner to actually
be
a rubber band. So he culled his collection and left the cart in an alley.

To save his back the trouble of hauling inessential weight, he confined himself to objects he deemed especially illustrative of the general crisis. These objects were not necessarily deformed or damaged in any describable fashion, though many were. Some were new and spotless exemplars of their type, still shrink-wrapped even, and it was as such that he chose them, if only to prove that, as an uncle had told him many forgotten years before, you can't spitshine a turd.

It did occur to him with nagging persistence that the root of the problem might lie closer to home, that the collected artifacts of creation were as they'd always been, but
he
had somehow slipped his boundaries. It could be, he realized, a problem of perception, though his eyes, at least, were fine. He decided not to pursue that possibility. It led him with excruciating inevitability to the high and crenellated parapets encircling The Incident, and to a painful question: if he could muster no faith in the world or in any of the myriad things that comprise it, what right had he to walk among them?

But this would get him nowhere. Perhaps, he decided, it was simply a question of context. Perhaps things were just in disarray, not damned each and every one. And if things — not all things, but the limited series of objects in his personal possession — could be arranged in the proper order, like puzzle pieces, or magic words, or the digits of a pass-code, everything might again become itself. And he might rest.

Gabriel lived on the fourth floor of the Redemption Arms Hotel. The sign in the lobby read, “No Guests, No Exceptions,” but they sneaked past the desk when the clerk was in the john. Gabriel's room was an eight-foot-by-eight-foot square of graffiti-scarred plaster, once painted beige but now various shades of brown and yellow and even blue from the grease from people's hair, their saliva and other excretions, particles of food. The walls only went up about seven feet, and the remaining space between the sheetrock and the ceiling was filled with a single length of chicken wire, which made it feel as much like a cage as a room. Between the exposed and cobweb-coated beams of the ceiling was a dust-smudged mirrored dome concealing cameras, or at least suggesting the possibility of such concealment. But whether the dome above was empty or filled with watchful electronic eyes did not matter. Everything said and done in every room could be heard in every other. They sat on Gabriel's bed and listened to muzzled sounds of fucking rise from one room, unmuzzled weeping from another, and somewhere a cheery pop melody leaking thinly from the speaker of a transistor radio.

Gabriel sipped at a warm quart of Miller High Life. “I wish I could say it was good to see you,” he said. His hands were shaking.

“C'mon, Gabriel,” the stranger said. “Why all the bitterness?”

Gabriel just snorted. “Funny,” he said. He pushed an oiled strand of hair from his brow. “You're funny.”

The stranger leaned back to better regard his friend, who wore heavy black-framed glasses taped in one corner with duct tape, faded jeans and a t-shirt that depicted an enormous hand, index finger extended to one side, and the words “I'm with stupid.” Gabriel was unhsaven. Broken blood vessels lined his cheeks. The stranger beheld all this — the bloat of Gabriel's eyes, his thinning hair — and spoke. “You look good. You do.”

“Yeah, I'm a looker. You look like shit. What happened to your suit?”

The stranger smiled and shook his head. He held one hand cupped inside the other. “I'll be honest,” he said. “Things aren't what they used to be.”

“They never were.”

The stranger nodded. “Maybe not. I made mistakes. I'll be the first to admit it. I was short-sighted. I was immodest.”

Gabriel laughed.

“Is that funny?” the stranger asked. “I'm trying to be straight with you. Give me a little credit here. I was headstrong. I was proud. I know that. Look at me now. Look at this fucking suit, Gabriel. I'm in rags. Me. Rags. Like a stinking Bowery bum. How could I not know I made mistakes? And still you hate me.”

Gabriel fished a cigarette butt from the ashtray on the dresser. “Yes,” he said. He lit the butt and shook out the match.

“You have every right.”

“I know.”

They were silent, Gabriel standing by the dresser, hands on his hips, smoke rising from his cigarette like a curtain across his face. His guest sat on the unmade bed, on the gray sheets, his shoulders hunched. He stared at his knees and in a whisper said, “I'm sorry.” A few rooms over the moaning rose to a crescendo. “Please, baby,” someone said, panting. “Please.” There was a shriek of pleasure, then a grunt, then a voice again, softer now, thick-throated: “Baby, please.”

Gabriel ashed on the floor. “What do you want?” he asked.

“I need your help,” the stranger said. “I need a favor.”

“What?”

“I want to set things right.”

“You're too late.”

“Please, Gabriel. I'm asking you. Help me.”

“What about Michael? Ask him.”

“He's in law school. Just bought himself a Saab. Married. Useless.”

A smile crossed Gabriel's lips and just as quickly fled. He lifted the beer to his mouth. He said it again, more a statement than a question. “What do you want.”

“I want to be back on top. I can't fix it unless I can get back up. I want to undo the damage, to do it again but right.”

Gabriel shook his head. “You don't learn,” he said.

“I do learn. I have learned. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm humbling myself before you Gabriel.”

“What do you want from me.”

The stranger straightened his back, raised his eyes, caught Gabriel's eyes in his. “Be my sword,” he said, then whispered it again. “Be my sword.”

Whole volumes of text skittered across Gabriel's face: epic narratives of temptation, disgust, regret. Then whatever bright conglomeration of emotion animating them was extinguished, and his eyes went blank, dull, dead. Gabriel spat a fleck of tobacco onto the floor. “It's over,” he said. “No more.”

His visitor rose from the bed. “I won't ask again,” he said.