Ether (7 page)

But she realized eventually that if she did not force herself to get up, she simply never would, that only motion could pull her out of this. It did, and here she was as a result of its predation, caught by the approach of daylight, rushing homeward. The streets were already crowded with wheeling forklifts, men pushing handcarts, trucks in slow reverse. The buildings yawned, their mouths uncovered. The shutters above the loading bays had been rolled away and here and there between the trucks she caught a peek inside the warehouses: high-ceilinged expanses stacked to the roof beams with row upon row of crated goods, lit in a pale fluorescent windowless green. She dodged her way through the throng. Everyone ignored her. A pickup truck squeezed through the alley and nudged her aside with its bumper. Her hands began to tremble. A man, arms filled with boxes, backed into her and knocked her down without pausing to see what or whom he'd hit.

Kneeling where she'd fallen, on one knee and with her palm against the street, she found that she was crying. She'd scraped the knee and maybe bruised an elbow — but it wasn't that. The shock of the fall dislodged something in her, shook loose a stopper somewhere, and the tears rolled from her eyes. She stood. The sky was nearly light now. A semi steamed past just inches from her shoulder. A small gaggle of men laughing and drinking coffee from paper cups approached, briefly engulfed her, and walked on. The world moved through her like a river through a net. Her chin was wet. She swabbed at her cheeks with the heel of her hand.

The woman did not feel sorry for herself. She could not complain of her deaf ears or her mute tongue, of her poverty or her solitude. These things had long been hers. Nor did she mourn the hummingbird. It was only a bird. Birds die. What she felt was something more diffuse, an ache carved out by all the rush and tumble of the universe, all its carelessness and the loneliness of things — not just the living and the sentient but the entire silent world of objects — cinder blocks, books, exhaust pipes. She could find no solidarity there. Everything was alone, everything misplaced. Everything was lost. The bird was not special. Nor was she.

She pushed her way out of the alleys and made a dash across the lots. The landscape now seemed soaked in sadness, saturated, as if sorrow were the one thing that held it all together, that saved the world from dissolution, preventing all its constituent particles from spinning off to stake their claims alone. Telephone wires hung from the poles along the avenues and even the arc of them, the receding, conjoining lines of them, seemed to tell a story of aloneness and loss.

She reached the fence. She was almost home. She looked back. The sun had risen from behind a cloud and was high enough now to light those wires so that they looked like filaments of gold leading off to some less doleful place. The dust raised by the passing trucks glowed gold as well. The cars in the lots glittered. Their hubcaps shone. The rooflines of the warehouses too, and every east-facing wall was remade by the dawn, gilded and bright, as if everything had been lit quietly aflame. Then the woman did a funny thing. She laughed. She wiped her nose and laughed. For all the light's auroral trickery, the world seemed no less drenched with grief. But it was also something else, something almost complete and almost beautiful, but just beyond her reach.

The sun rose higher and the stranger's suit, heavy and wet with dew, soon dried. His limbs loosened with the warmth. Insects woke by the millions and commenced to rub together their wings and their hairy stick-like legs, celebrating the heat of another day with a vast and undulating buzz as the stranger strolled back toward the city. He crossed the field of brambles through which the bagman had led him and there collected on his pants and on his socks and in the callused flesh of his ankles dozens of barbed golden spurs. He picked them off and found the old empty dog track, its high walls adorned with blackened glass tubes once alive with neon light, dim now but still twisted in the shape of racing greyhounds. He pushed through the rusted gate. The track had grown over with thistle and dandelion. Half the terraced wooden seats were splintered, smashed. Vines snaked across the scoreboard. In a corner on the ground over where the concession stand had been, among shards of glass in a dozen shades of brown and green, the stranger found the remains of the mechanized rabbit, once the root of so much fuss, torn now from its track, fur worn away and matted, one ear gone. He nudged it with his toe. What fur remained fell off, revealing wood and wire. He kicked at the rabbit's wire-stuffed head and watched it bounce across the dirt.

The stranger walked on until he found the train yards. He sat on a railroad tie and tossed a rock from palm to palm until among all the sleepy freights a commuter train zipped past, the sunlight bouncing off its tinted windows, blinding him. He stood and followed the tracks on which it ran out away from the city. The stranger kicked a stone in front of him, whistled a tune low into his beard. The tracks ran through block-long plains of rubble where brown brick apartment buildings had once towered. They skirted the base of a pyramidal mountain of trash fringed with soft green grass. Gulls screamed in the air above. One clutched a chicken bone in its beak. The others harried and attacked it. The stranger did not look up. The tracks took him past yawning sand pits, truck yards behind barbed wire, the back doors of machine shops, rendering plants, shooting ranges, a brothel decked out in blue and violet neon. He came upon a boy leaping high on a trampoline set alone in the center of a field of broken bricks. He paused. The boy had not seen him. The stranger shifted his parcel from arm to arm. He tugged lightly at the string that bound it. The boy pulled his knees to his chest as he rose. His eyes rolled upwards, rapt. The stranger considered him for a moment, then retied the parcel and walked straight on.

At last he reached a trestle where the tracks passed over a wide suburban street, empty, at this hour, of cars. He scrambled down the embankment to the road and caught his pant leg on a root, tore off half a cuff, cursed. A mile down that road he turned onto a smaller road, and from there onto a smaller road still, not paved but dirt and rutted. There he found a small clapboard house, paint peeling, windows boarded up. A camera was still mounted on the eaves above the door, but it did not blink or hum and its lens was furred with grime. The stranger sat on a log in the shade behind the house, facing a wide and overgrown lawn. Roses, untended, bloomed on woody, head-high stalks. Tomato vines had leapt from their cages and covered half the yard. The fruits hung red and heavy, dripping, entrails exposed by birds. He untied his shoes. They were ankle-high calfskin lace-ups with dainty inch-high heels and soles now paper-thin. He shook a rock or two from each one, poured the sand from his socks, and picked what dirt and lint he could dislocate from the spans between his toes. A grasshopper settled on his knee, a shocking green, but it leapt away before his hand could reach it.

When he had rested for a while, the stranger retied the laces of his shoes and untied the twine that bound his treasured package. He unfolded the brown paper wrapping, exposing his possession to the sun, the clouds, the high branches of the trees. He searched around for prying eyes and cameras, but found none, and lifted the thing in both his hands. I'll tell you what it is and was, but that alone won't tell you much. It was a weapon, but not like any other. In the overhanging shadow of the eaves, it looked almost dull, no color at all, no shine to it, not like the sexy things that sulk blued beneath the gunshop glass, but like something baked from clay or ash, or carved from lifeless flesh, which after all is kin to ash and clay.

The thing had a barrel short and snubbed, but with a twist and a shake of the wrist it telescoped out to cartoon proportions, longer than the stranger's forearm and wider than his wrist. Its magazine swelled like a grooved balloon. It looked to have had a stock once, but it was broken off and jagged still at the break. The grip had been repaired with masking tape, now worn almost black with grit and sweat and ancient blood except here and there where it was newly patched with red electric tape.

In the light though, when the stranger stepped a few feet forward, the thing looked like it was made of glass, or of some crystal of impossible quality, reflecting every color in the spectrum and a few you haven't thought of, and when the stranger flicked his wrist again it looked more sword than gun, long as a broomstick and edged so sharp it would slice your eyes to see it. And when he pointed it at a squirrel in a faraway tree, it was suddenly a fearsome ax, blade curled like the crescent moon and near as big, dripping light and weight and death. When he twirled it like a cheerleader's baton between his fingers that blade condensed to a spearhead, black and slender but still boastful of its cruelty. And when he shifted it from hand to hand it shrank in size to almost nothing, something for a lady's handbag, a little scratchy peashooter, good for fending off drunks and the smaller variety of muggers. He spun and tossed it like a TV Wyatt Earp, but what he caught was just a penknife with broken blade and rusted hinge, capable of spreading tetanus if no quicker death. The stranger closed his fist, and if you had the strength and opportunity to pry it open, you'd find inside those long fingers nothing more than a plain old stone, a flat dull pebble, a shard of bone, some earth.

The bagman woke and found himself alone. He rose hurriedly and searched the perimeter of his camp, pushing clumps of reeds aside to look between them, sliding his bags across the concrete to inspect the ground beneath. He found nothing. The stranger had left nothing behind, and yet everything seemed changed. If the material world had before felt imperfectly formed to the point of actual satire, now, in the wake of this encounter, it felt shabbier than ever, cheapened. The bagman recalled the stillness with which the stranger had sat on the swaying bus, as if he were invisibly rooted to some anchor deep below the earth, or conversely, as if he were himself the weight of a pendulum suspended from the clouds, impervious to mere terrestrial inertia. And he recalled the thing the stranger had carried as if it had been some golden scepter or an emerald larger than his head and not a plain parcel wrapped in stained brown paper and tied with kitchen twine. It was perfect, the bagman thought, a perfect thing.

The bagman skipped his usual morning ablutions and immediately set about sweeping clear a larger square of concrete. He folded the newspapers on which he'd slept, tossed them in the bushes, and removed his possessions piece by piece from the plastic bags that held them. He laid them side by side in a wide circle around the camp and spiraled them in toward the firepit. Among quite a few additional objects, he produced a fan belt; a pair of sunglasses; a ballpoint pen; a pencil sharpener; a volleyball; a balaclava; two bungee cords, red and white; a coconut; a plastic fork; a skull-shaped stone; three varieties of seashells; an unrolled condom, dried to the consistency of beachstrewn kelp; a fez; a pair of mittens; a yellow legal pad; a purple bandanna; a maple leaf; a plastic owl; a postcard depicting three baboons; an aluminum hose-clamp; a box of sugared cereal; a small plush monkey, missing one ear; a rusted can opener; a plastic action figure gripping a scimitar with tiny yellow hands; the cast-off exoskeleton of a locust; the Book of Mormon; a magic eightball; a creased watercolor of a sunset; a paisley necktie; the dry stone of an apricot; a pornographic magazine, the cover of which bore the words “The Beaver Twins: Wide Open”; a lumpy pearl; three pebbles of unusual color and shape; a toothbrush still wrapped in its cellophane packaging; a pair of crew socks; a coffee mug that announced itself to be the World's #1 Granny; a Y-shaped twig; the dried foot of a seagull; an empty green bottle that had once contained aftershave lotion; a spark plug; a magnifying glass; an unopened box of bandaids, a glass shaker filled with crushed red pepper; a dog whistle that had never been used to call a dog; a pair of handcuffs,
sans
key; the crushed ribs and vertebrae of a garter snake preserved in a ziplock bag; a hearing aid; a hand towel; a small, faded plastic pumpkin; two unmatching sandals; a sweatshirt advertising a company that manufactures sweatshirts; two wedding rings, one bent; and a single bobby pin.

When he had emptied all three bags, the bagman's possessions lay helixed about beneath the overpass like a crop circle, but even this impressive arrangement gave him no pleasure. All spread out like that, the pale tawdriness of his things — and of all things, not just the pumpkin, the monkey and the twig, but the concrete they lay on, the cracks in it, the pillars that supported the highway above him, the highway itself, the reeds and trash-strewn bushes — seemed only to have multiplied. He considered rearranging it all in a pyramid, or something close to a cube, but dismissed both ideas as futile. Nothing could redeem these things. There was no magic order, no code to break or secret lock to pick. All context was equally empty, for all its possible components were empty too. They were already their own ghosts, these things, their own crinkled husks. But the bagman knew one thing that wasn't.

He turned and walked away. He could not remember the last time he had taken three steps without his bags. He felt almost weightless. He wanted to skip. His eyes seemed to allow more light into his brain. He remembered the name of this sensation. It was not quite freedom: it was called relief. He kicked a rock from his path and broke into a bent, lumbering sprint.

He made it halfway across the field. The light had grown too bright inside his skull. His heart thumped. His mouth was dry. He couldn't breathe. He was a large man, and far from young, so maybe it was the effort of running fast. But maybe it was something else. Maybe he could no longer allow himself to live unburdened. A wave of nausea overtook him, and he remembered. He had made a deal. What was his was no longer his. It wasn't even his to leave behind.

The bagman recovered his breath and walked back with eyes downcast. He retrieved the things from the ground and stuffed them into the bags, but not with any care and not in any special order. He just stuffed them in.