Ether (4 page)

Gabriel dropped his eyes. He picked at a scab on his knuckle. He scratched behind his ear. “Good,” he said.

A wide, warm smile stretched across the stranger's face. He tossed a few crumpled bills at Gabriel's pillow. “Buy yourself a bender,” he said. “Enjoy your life. I've taken too much of your time already, Gabriel, you have things to do, I'm sure. But it's been good to catch up. Really. Now, before I go, I must ask you to give me something, something of mine that you will no longer need.”

Gabriel shrugged. “It's under the bed,” he said.

I lie awake and listen to the helicopter drone overhead. The police up there as always, a loud and clumsy eye watching over everything, or trying to, skimming above the gridded streets, squinting, spying, bloodrimmed. The searchlight licks at the curtains. It comes into our room. It is brazen enough to reach in through the open window and caress her ankle while I lie on the bed beside her. She doesn't stir. The light withdraws. The helicopter flies away, and circles back, and flies away again.

It was her cries that woke me. Or maybe before she cried out, when her body first tensed and her hand dropped from my hip so that she could hug herself and fend off whatever dreamtime demon was attacking. I tried to wake her, my hands on her shoulders. It's okay baby wake up baby it's okay. But she whimpered and shook and dodged behind her hands. It's okay baby I'm here wake up. She didn't wake. The whimpers turned to sobs, fear to grief and still under the cover of sleep. I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and her twitching eyelids until another dream overtook the first and she slept there in the crook of my arm. I couldn't see her dreams. I tried but I could not see them. And if I couldn't then how could I possibly help? So I listened to the trucks clank by out on the avenue. For a while I watched the ceiling fan. It did not do anything unusual. The camera above the bed blinked red. A dog barked. Somewhere a rooster crowed. The helicopter circled over someone else's house.

I ease my arm out from under her. I touch her cheek and watch her sleep. Her hair spills across the pillows. Her breasts rising, catching, falling. A tiny moan. She turns on her side, away from me. She curls into herself. I sip at the water on the table beside the bed. I stand and shut the door behind me. I shuffle out to the porch, and sit, and wish I still smoked cigarettes. Perhaps I wouldn't have been moved to write this if I still smoked, or if I drank the way I used to. But my lungs are shot and barstools bore me now, so I try to sit still. My feet are cold. I listen for crickets and coyotes, but I hear none. I see no moon, no stars, no shooting stars.The wind is silent. The helicopter's gone. The streets are empty, frozen, lined on both sides with sleeping cars. The streetlamps reflect off the clouds and off each other. What can I do but write to you?

This is the world. I need to see it clearly. These empty streets and all they hold. The stranger who pads through my dreams. Or who would if I could sleep, if I had dreams. But even here, on this dim porch, more awake than I want to be, I smell his tattered suit, the tired grease of him. I want you to see him too, wherever it is that you are reading this. On a train perhaps. On a sofa with your feet up. At your desk, pretending to work. On a hard, backless bench, waiting for the bus. In bed, beside someone or alone with the sheets. Did I guess right? It doesn't matter. I want you to see him right here where I am, and in this empty street where he cannot be seen, and in the dark and sleepy rooms behind me where he also is not. I want you to see him as I see him, because I need you to see this world, and me in it, alone as you are. That does matter to me, though I can't quite tell you why.

On my porch is a small wooden table, a potted plant, two mismatched wooden chairs. I sit in one. He's in the other. His legs are crossed and he's humming to himself. I can't make out the tune. A streetlamp flickers. A possum scoots across the sidewalk. Somewhere a dog barks. Coyotes answer. Or maybe that's a siren, distorted as it bounces through the hills. The stranger slowly taps one foot. He's calm but hardly patient. He turns to me and speaks. “I have to go,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. “Then go.”

The stranger left the hotel with a package tucked beneath the jacket of his suit. It was wrapped in oil-stained brown paper and bound with twine. Its weight made him stoop slightly to one side. The paper crinkled as he walked. After two blocks he flagged a bus, paid the driver and headed for the back, passing women clutching infants to their breasts, students in plaid skirts blushing and giggling, men in faded clothing with headphones on their ears, nodding and sometimes nodding off. The rear of the bus was nearly empty. A sharp smell hung over the aisle, like a soft French cheese aged in soiled tube socks. It did not appear to bother the stranger, who took a seat in the last row and laid the package on his lap. He gripped it with both hands.

Beside him sat the source of the odor, a large man in a knit cap, his beard as white as the stranger's, his eyes as yellow as the two teeth that jutted forth between his blistered lips. The man wore a black woolen sweater with woven reindeer in green and red gallivanting across his chest. The sweater was too small, and revealed the three layers of dun-colored undershirts he wore beneath it, all of them also too small, so that his grey-brown belly puckered forth bare above the waistband of his sweatpants. Arrayed around the man were his belongings, by which you will likely recognize him: three green lawn and leaf bags stuffed to bursting with fabric — a flannel shirt, a pillowcase, an argyle sock — and with rusted bicycle chains, plastic toys, balls of rubber bands, an empty box of cookies. The bagman hummed to himself as he emptied one of the bags, piling its contents on the seat between him and the stranger, dividing his possessions with great care between the two remaining bags, in turn removing their contents to make room for the new.

The bus's air brakes squealed. Weaving through traffic, it heaved back and forth and from side to side, but the stranger, like the fulcrum of a pendulum, did not shift in his seat. The bagman, swaying with the lunges of the bus, paused in his humming and ceased his rearranging to observe for a moment the still, white-suited man beside him. He fixed his gaze on the paper-wrapped package clutched to the stranger's knees. For a moment, it took his breath away. He almost could not bear to look at it. It was precisely what it was.

He directed his eyes at the front of the bus, somewhere just above the driver's head, but his words were for the stranger. “Trade ya,” he said, his voice deep and hollow, echoey.

The stranger turned his head to his left and regarded his neighbor with a cool curiosity. “Trade me what?” he asked.

The man with the bags gazed upward and searched the air above his head. “All of this,” he replied, as if biting off each word. “All I got.”

“For what?” the stranger asked.

“All you got.”

The stranger considered the offer. “You want what I have?”

His interlocutor's yellow eyes returned to the package on his lap. They did not blink. The bagman nodded.

The stranger shook his head. “You cannot have what I have,” he said. “But I will take what's yours. All that's yours is mine. Do you understand?”

The bagman thought for a moment, then nodded his assent. “Okay,” he said. He stared hard at the tank-topped shoulder of a woman three rows up. He gripped his knees with both hands. “But what do I get?”

“You get to carry it,” the stranger said. “You get what you need.”

A shiver ran up the bagman's spine and his mouth emitted something less than a moan but far more than an ordinary exhalation. He nodded again. “Deal,” he said, and offered forth his hand.

The stranger beheld the hand, its scabbed knuckles and ochrous, filth-caked nails. “Don't ever touch me,” he said, and smiled.

It started with the dog. The long-haired girl was driving her father's car, just around the neighborhood and not too fast but they were laughing about something (they would never remember what), when the short-haired girl suddenly gripped her by the shoulder and yelled “Stop!” A dog lay in the road. An old dog, its long and probably deaf ears streaked with gray and splayed out on the pavement. The long-haired girl yanked at the wheel and stomped the brake. The car swerved up onto the curb. The short-haired girl slid hard across the wide bench seat, so hard that when the car came to a stop she found that she was lying with her head in her best friend's lap, facing upward with her eyes clamped shut. She opened them and saw the long-haired girl looking down at her, her face frozen in that moment of panicked action. She began to laugh again, harder than before.

“Shit,” said the long-haired girl, perturbed. “You should really wear a seat belt.” But then she too began to laugh and she put her hand on the upturned cheek of her friend. When they were done laughing her hand was still there. With her finger, the long-haired girl traced the curve of the short-haired girl's mouth, the bow of her lips and the shallow gutter that connected them to her nose. She placed her thumb between her best friend's teeth. Her friend bit down on it. “Ouch,” she said.

The short-haired girl sat up on her elbows. Her cheeks were flushed. She reached up and placed one hand behind the head of the long-haired girl. She pulled her closer. But the long-haired girl's seat belt locked and would not let her move. They giggled, scared this time and barely breathing. The long-haired girl reached around to unbuckle the belt, and bent to kiss her friend.

Their hands were everywhere. They bit each other's ears, and lips, and shoulders. They kissed each other's eyelids and the tips of each other's noses. They told each other jokes composed entirely of kisses that tickled them more than any joke they'd heard before. They sucked at each other's tongues as if they knew that they could find no other sustenance, not ever. They rolled on top of one another and switched places, and switched places again. They found such softness in each other's flesh that they did not imagine could exist in life. They panted, and whimpered softly. The short-haired girl shed five soft ecstatic tears.

When they had finished, the two friends lay for a long while and held each other tight. The long-haired girl rebuttoned the short-haired girl's shorts and leaned forward so that the short-haired girl could zip her skirt for her.

“Did we really just do that?” asked the short-haired girl.

“I don't know,” the long-haired girl said. “I don't know what we did.” She bit her lip, stifled a smile, and kissed her friend some more.

They sat up. The car straddled the sidewalk, one rear wheel in the street, the two front tires on someone's weedy lawn. A few yards to the right of the short-haired girl's window, the dog snored in the street. Its lip fluttered up, then fell, then shivered up again. They watched the dog sleep, and squeezed each other's hands.

When twelve blocks later the bus shrieked to a halt, the stranger pushed through the doors and stepped onto the pavement. The bus pitched forward a few yards before lurching to a stop again. Its rear doors swung out once more, like an insect's wings, or the opening of a mechanical mouth. First one green plastic bag then a second shot out from between the doors, like eggs or some uncertain offspring of smooth polymeric extrusion. After them, the bagman tumbled out, carrying a third bag in his arms, panting already. He crouched, heaved all three bags over his shoulders and carried them like that, two in his right hand and one in the left. “Hey,” he said to the stranger, almost choking from the effort to speak. “Wait up.”

But the stranger did not wait. The bagman had to run to keep pace with him. He dropped here one bag, there another, and paused to restuff them with contents spilled out on the sidewalk: a plastic canary, a pair of children's underpants decorated with race cars and locomotives, a broken, keyless calculator. “Hey,” the bagman bellowed, jiggling along the sidewalk at full canter, panting to keep up with the stranger's loping stride. “Wait.”

This time the stranger stopped. He even turned around. The bagman put down his bags and mopped at his brow with his cap. He straightened his sweater. “There's a spot I know,” the bagman said. He shuffled his feet. He stared down at the weeds growing in the cracks of the cement, at flattened disks of chewing gum, at a pigeon pecking at the yellow filter of a discarded cigarette. He pursed his lips and spoke again. “For resting. Cause soon it's dark.”

The stranger thought it over. He eyed the bagman hungrily. “A spot you know,” he said. “For resting.” He nodded. The bagman shouldered his burden and shuffled off, humming to himself, the stranger at his side.

They walked at least a mile through the city streets. They shouldered their way down a busy block of restaurants through cashmered crowds cooing over window-mounted menus. They passed shop windows stacked with flat-screened televisions as wide as bedsheets and mobile telephones smaller than your thumb. They stepped over the legs of sleeping children, curled naked on the concrete beneath t-shirts worn like dresses. They hiked through an empty warehouse district where they watched a single carp leaping and swimming in the rubbishy streams that coursed the gutters. They passed a midget woman with sores on her arms, throat and brow, dancing alone in an alley, her face contorted with anguish, tears tumbling down her cheeks — no music, no moans or sobs or sighs, just grieving ballerina pantomime. The bagman stopped to watch her, but the stranger did not pause and when the bagman noticed he'd been left behind, he reshouldered his bags and hurried after him. In the alley, the woman pliéed and pirouetted, and executed a perfect weeping entrechat.

They crossed acres of railroad yards, kicking through the ballast, hopping the tracks, dodging unmoored boxcars rolling huge and silent beneath the hunched brown sun. They trekked past an abandoned dog track and on through a field of brambles where plastic potato chip bags skipped in the wind. At last they stopped beneath a concrete freeway overpass. Speeding cars breathed loud above them. “Here,” the bagman said, and laid down his bags beside a pillar.