Ether (8 page)

The stranger sat there kneeling, the stained brown paper empty at his ankle beside him. Between his palms he held the thing. His mouth hung agape and his eyes shone with something very much like love. He stroked it as you might caress an infant, caressing not just the humble thing itself but the luminous and empyrean future that it promised to call forth, and the past it could not fail to redeem. He was lost in it. The voices, when at last he heard them, arrived as if from somewhere far away.

“You old bum!” said one voice.

“Faggot!” said another.

“Stinking perv!” a third voice said.

“Dirty old bum!” the first chimed in again.

Across the yard the stranger spied a clump of boys in windbreakers and baseball caps worn backwards. He grinned and counted them. One. Two. Three. The fourth a fat one. The stranger rose, his eyes dancing with delight. Four boys. Foul-mouthed boys, ill-bred and nasty-minded. Nothing more corrupt than children. As good a place to start as any. He lifted the thing in his fist and with a steady hand took aim first at the one farthest from him, a fat boy hanging back a bit, fumbling in the pockets of his baggy shorts. But before the stranger could execute his wishes, something hit him in the ribs. As he stepped back a second stone struck him hard in the wrist. He tripped over the log behind him and, falling, lost his grip on the thing in his hand. It fell in the grass out of his sight. He hissed a curse.

“You got him!” said the first voice.

“I got him too!” said another.

“Hit him again!” the third boy said.

“Don't be a faggot, Tubs. Throw the fucking rock!” yelled the first boy to the fourth.

The boys let loose another volley of stones and it was the fat one this time who hit his mark, striking the stranger on the temple with a chunk of granite as big as a fist.

“Hah!” the fat boy yelled, pumping his chubby fist, “Who's the faggot now?”

The stranger groaned and groped in the weeds. At last his fingers found what they were searching for, but by the time he stood and blinked away the blood in his eyes enough to be able to aim, the boys had scattered through the trees.

“Bum!” yelled one boy, his voice trailing off as he dived over a hedge.

“Old bum!” yelled another, diving after him.

“Who's the faggot now?” howled the fat boy with glee as he followed his friends to safety.

The slenderest of the three sat shirtless over his needlepoint. He was quite tall, and heavily tattooed with lightning bolts and crosses. A panther crawled up his arm. An eagle spread its wings across his shoulders. A cartoon woodpecker winked just below his navel. He sat on a trunk, his pale collarbones jutting, red suspenders hanging at his sides. As he stitched, a flush of pride spread across his cheeks and upwards, even to the peak of his shining, hairless skull. “Almost done,” he announced in a whisper that barely contained his excitement.

In front of him, a short and rotund but solid man, similarly inked but with his red suspenders pulled up over a sleeveless undershirt, shaved the cratered, pink scalp of a third man, tall, thick-necked, and fat. The taller man sat on a metal folding chair, which, beneath him, looked to have been burgled from a doll's house. He was dressed like his companions in black jeans and high, shiny, red-laced boots.

“Where do you get that?” the seated man said, suddenly annoyed by the tall and skinny man's pronouncement. “It's not one yet. It's not even nine.”

“Stay still,” scolded the short and fat man. He stood back to examine his work and hone his razor across a leather strop. “If you keep moving I'll chop your scars off.”

“Go on,” said the tall and fat.

“Your scalp,” went on the short and fat, “has more potholes, pimples and pockmarks than your mother's carbuncled ass. Did you know that?”

His comrade responded obliquely: “Did you know that a moray eel's teeth are so filled with rotting bits of fish-flesh that if one bites you, you're sure to get septicemia and die within moments of an agonizing death? Did you know that? Did you know you look like one, that if you only had a neck you'd look exactly like a green moray eel?”

The tall and skinny guffawed. “Tell him about the sea snakes.”

“They don't live in lakes, idiot,” replied the tall and fat. “They live under rocks in the ocean. Twelve feet long. Covered in slime. The green morays have blue skin, but they appear to be green due to the slime that coats them. Lots of funny fishes in the sea. Sea snakes, for instance. Most common marine reptile there is. Closely related to their terrestrial cousins. Can be nine feet long. They hunt underwater, surface for air. Sailors sometimes see big balls of them, hundreds of them smarming about in one humongous ball. Ouch.” He slapped at the short man's calf and rubbed at his head, checking his fingers for blood. “Watch that. I have a blemish up there.”

“A what?” the shorter man inquired. “I hope you didn't say you have a blemish. Your whole head is a blemish. A blemish balanced on top of a blemish that blemishes about on two long, bloated blemishes.”

The tall and thin looked up from his stitching. “Flemish,” he said, and giggled to himself.

The tall and fat continued. “They travel in hordes, sea snakes. Big messes of them, bands one hundred feet wide and seven miles long across the water, nothing but snakes by the millions slithering through the waves. And their poison, get this, is eight times more poisonous than the venom of a king cobra. Ten times more than a rattler's. One drop is enough to kill three men and most times they bite they inject five drops at least. So you're done for if one gets you. Sea snakes. God's creatures. Wonders of the deep.”

He ran a palm over his scalp, scouting for nicks and missed patches of hair. The shorter man smacked it away.

“Then there's the blue-ringed octopus,” the tall and fat went on. “No bigger than a golf ball but it carries enough venom to kill twenty-six men. Maculotoxin, it's called. Like tetrodotoxin, that the puffer fish have. Ten thousand times more deadly than cyanide. Blocks the neural pathways. You don't stand a chance. Pretty little things though. They glow blue when they're excited. You can't imagine a more attractive cephalopod.”

The thin man pulled his needle down through the canvas and tied off the final strand of his design. “There,” he said, and turned it around for his companions to see. “What do you think?”

On a white background, surrounded by a crude border of death's heads, pink carnations, and paired red lightning bolts, he had stitched two words in sharp Teutonic script.

The short and fat paused his barbering and scratched at the hinge of his jaw. “Judo Maus,” he said. “What's that?”

“It means, ‘white pride,' I think. Or ‘white power,' ” the tall and skinny beamed. “Or ‘fuck all Jews,' something like that. It's German.”

“Who told you that?”

“Not Gujarat. Fuck no. In German. That one we met at the club last week who just came back from Leipzig, he kept saying it:
judo maus
. White power!” He shouted and punched at the ceiling for emphasis. “Where should we put it up?”

The tall and fat stood suddenly. All three men kicked their heels in unison, and threw their right hands in the air. The short and fat clenched his straight razor in his fist. Together they saluted, “Judo maus!”

The folding chair creaked as the tall and fat took his seat once more. He indicated the far wall of the room with a nod. “Hang it above the chaise lounge,” he said. “With the others.”

He could no longer see the boys. Even their shouts and giggles had faded, so the stranger aimed at the unkempt hedge over which the four had leaped. It shivered, and for a second it seemed to even bleed. It glowed orange for a moment, every last twig of it, then fell away, just ash. He took aim at a tree beside the hedge. Its leaves slipped from its branches and the bare trunk danced like a hair held over a flame, then disappeared. The stranger reduced every tree in sight to black and sticky dust. A cypress, two oaks, some pepper trees. He burned the grass and the weeds and the abandoned house behind him. With a screech that sounded as if it came from a living thing, the windows shivered, then burst. He burned the rocks and the fallen branches and fallen leaves and the snails and beetles and spiders and worms that made their homes there. He scorched the earth itself, every ditch and lump and pebble, until it bled and pussed and healed hard and sharp as glass, so that no living thing would ever wish to walk on it, and no seed would ever think to germinate there.

When he was done, he gazed around him at the smoking ruins. A breeze still blew. From somewhere he could hear a siren. He didn't feel any better, so he kicked a hot and blackened rock, and broke his toe, then yelled and limped away before the fire department came.

I'm halfway home when the stranger stops me on the sidewalk. It hasn't been the best of mornings. I paid the rent and I'm pretty sure the check won't bounce, but I forgot to pack a lunch so I'm walking home to save the five dollars a sandwich would cost me, plus another three bucks for round-trip bus fare. I'm almost dizzy from adding and subtracting numbers in my head, checking and rechecking columns, trying to figure out what it'll take to get through the month, so I'm happy, in a way, for the distraction, if hardly in the mood to justify myself. But this is none of your business. Really. He stands in front of me, his arms akimbo. He's whistling softly to himself and tapping his right foot.

I step around him. The stranger turns and walks beside me. He rests his left hand on my right shoulder. It is not an affectionate gesture. “Tell me something,” he says, and squeezes hard.

I twist away to shake his hand off. “No hello?” I say. “No how are you?”

“Hello how are you,” he says. He smiles flatly, a little too quickly to come off as nonchalant.

“Shitty,” I answer. “But thanks for asking. What do you want to know?”

“Where is this going?” he asks.

“This?” I say.

He waves his hand at the sidewalk to indicate the path before him. “This,” he says.

“Don't you know?”

“How could I?”

“Because you're the one who's going there.”

“You're not funny,” the stranger says.

I shrug. I didn't mean to be funny. We reach the corner. The light is red. A few yards to our right, a dog in the yard of a transmission shop barks behind a chain-link fence. It's a chow, its greasy fur matted in uneven auburn dreadlocks, black gums drawn back and howling. Clearly, it would kill us if it could. The notion of a world beyond the fence, of creatures free to move about the world at will, is apparently too much for it.

The stranger ignores the dog. “You're not going to answer me?” he asks.

“Should I?”

“You should.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked.” He seems quite sure of this.

I smile. “Not good enough,” I say. The stranger stares at me, his eyes aflame. I want to laugh, but don't. Really, I don't want to be cruel. Or not gratuitously so. The chow keeps snapping at the chainlink. It's foaming at the mouth. I don't feel good about this. In fact I feel a little sick.

“Are we wrestling now?” he asks.

“Yes,” I try to smile. “We're wrestling.” The light changes. The sign says WALK. I walk. He's not beside me anymore. I don't look back.

I take the side streets. I return to my worries. They waited for me. I do the math. I leap a puddle at the entrance to an alley and watch two sparrows fight inside an empty bag of cheese puffs. The bag twists and crinkles and jerks as if driven by some invisible conglomeration of gears, or by its own bumbling baggish will. One of the birds expels the other. It emerges dredged in day-glo orange dust, and flies away. For a second, I'm jealous of its flight. Maybe for longer than a second. Then the other sparrow flies away. The wind takes over where the birds left off, lifting the bag in the air.

I turn a corner and another corner and climb the last block up the hill to my house. Her car is not in the driveway. The house will be empty. I'm hungry, and can't remember what's in the fridge. Peanut butter if nothing else. I lift the latch to the low wrought-iron gate and close it again behind me. Of course the stranger's there already, pacing on my porch, his arms behind his back. He's not whistling anymore.

“I won't ask twice,” he says.

“That's fine,” I tell him, digging into my pocket for the key.

A dog trots past on the sidewalk behind me, its nose to the concrete. Its coat is speckled, almost blue. Tail busy, ears alert. If dogs can smile, it's smiling. A loose-lipped piebald grin. It lifts a leg and dribbles piss on the gardenias. The stranger croaks out something like a laugh. “This time,” he says, “you're the one behind the fence.”

“Look around,” I say. “Where are you?”

The bagman stood on the corner. It was the time of morning known colloquially as rush hour, when the world fades to blur and humankind is granted collective license not to notice its surroundings, to gaze upon creation with the utmost pragmatism, regarding all objects solely as potential obstacles. This is a bad time. Motion is all that matters at this hour, and motion is what occurs, a mass, one-way migration. The endpoint of this pilgrimage, be it office, kitchen or factory floor, is the single image permitted to float before the mind's eye, odious though that image may be to its bearer. So the bagman, though he formed an island — an archipelago, if you count his three lumped bags — in a veritable sea of pedestrians, was for all intents and purposes, despite his girth, his appearance and his unorthodox scent, invisible.

He stood and watched the throng surge past. Men in suits bustled officiously by, and men in pressed khakis, and in canvas coveralls. Women in heels and binding skirts of worsted wool clicked past, and some in blue jeans, and in the pink and white uniforms of maids. None slumped. All held their shoulders high and chins forward as if hooked by the collar and pulled workward by a covert network of the slenderest monofilament. The bagman, who had once upon a long-lost time been one of them, watched in awe. How religiously they must regard creation to be able to march so surely through it, and to ignore it so completely.