Ether (17 page)

The bagman could not take his eyes from the flames. From how they skipped and flared and faded. They had no fixed substance. They rose and fell according to the logic of their own hunger for air and for fuel. They would eat until there was nothing left to eat, and then they would be gone. There was nothing to them — nothing save heat, compulsion and a certain deathly beauty — yet at the moment they were everything. Fire — he realized, like the stranger he'd been seeking and like the paper-wrapped parcel the stranger had clutched to his bony chest, and perhaps like nothing else — was exactly what it was. But it could give him nothing, and he wanted nothing from it. This epiphany did not feel like a victory, and the bagman felt no freer for it.

The old man wheezed and collapsed against his shins. The bagman heaved him up into his arms. The old man's head lolled. He was lighter than a single bag. Without looking back, the bagman walked off with this new burden, back toward the city, away from the smoke and away from the fire. He left his bags in the clearing for the fire to claim.

Flowers, it has been mentioned once or twice, are beautiful. So are stars and storm clouds, mountains and meadows, the flight of birds, the saddest songs, spiderwebs pulsing with struggling prey. Perhaps there is no need for reconciliation. Why should a foul breeze contradict a sweet one? Couldn't there be room for both? For everything? Creation is not a syllogism and cannot be divided. Or subdivided. It is, as any acid-tripping teen will tell you, all one. But one what?

I wait for the stranger. He doesn't come. He's not there in the mirror when I shave in the morning. He's not there at night when I brush my teeth. I don't find him on the couch in my office or the couch in my living room. He doesn't stop me in the street. I don't see him on my porch. He doesn't track mud through the hall. I look, but I don't find him. I look for him among the faces on the street, in cars stuck in traffic, in line at the market, on park benches and stoops. I see him nowhere.

I lie in bed. She sleeps beside me. The sheets feel heavy. Her breaths are even, long and slow. She hasn't had a nightmare in days. Her eyelids are fluttering, so I suppose she's dreaming, but I still can't see her dreams, if they're scary or sweet or something else. If I'm in them as well as in this darkened room.

I listen to the wind. It has been blowing all day. It whistles and shouts, makes the leaves rustle as if the sea's outside my door, waves lapping at the windows, begging to come in. I still can't sleep. Sometimes an empty can bounces along the asphalt, sometimes a big, hard plastic trash bin, protesting dumbly as it rolls.

She woke with his hands on her throat. The stranger kneeled on top of her. His thumbs were pressed against her larynx, but he did not squeeze. His eyes were red, and focused on some spot midway between her face and his. She lifted herself up on her elbows. His hands fell away. She took one of them in one of hers, smiled up at him with wide green eyes and kissed his palm. The stranger yanked his hand away as if she'd burned him. He struggled to his feet, turned, and almost fell through the door.

He sat in her small yard for hours, his eyes pressed shut, squatting among the dusty-shouldered dolls, wrapped in a blanket like a crone. The dolls, unimpressed, stood motionless. From all sides, sirens sang. Ash still fell from the sky. Even at noon, the sunlight filtered through the smoke a strange, dark violet. She squatted at his side and tried to draw his attention to two dragonflies, joined one to the other and flying together as one doubly thoraxed beast from bush to bush, carving wide, clumsy circles and wavering lines between the heavy flakes of ash. She laid her palm on his shoulder and pointed to the insects as they settled on a branch, then swam in lazy arcs across the sky, then stilled their wings and plunged towards the earth, pulling up and out of their freefall only millimeters above the ground. A low giggle rose from deep in her lungs, but the stranger did not look up.

She left him to go off foraging for food, and then returned, her pockets stuffed with chicken wings, an avocado, three bananas on their way from bruised to mush, an English muffin and more pears. Her face and hands and ankles were dark with smoke and ash. Her eyes, though, held no trace of shock or even unease at the recent transformations of the landscape, only joy at being by the stranger's side again. She found him no longer perched among the dolls, but crouching beside the warped particle­board wall of her shack, the blanket still pulled around his narrow back. Between his legs he held a battered and handle­less saucepan, filled with water from the pipe. The stranger stared down at his reflection, his eyes red-rimmed and lost in their own wavering image.

Later that night, long after she had blown out the kerosene lamp and stretched out to sleep, the stranger's fingers trembled still. Again he wrapped them around her sleeping throat and placed one thumb over the other atop the small hillock of her larynx. This time he did squeeze. She couldn't scream of course, but neither did she struggle. Her arms remained at her sides. Her legs tensed, but did not rise to kick him. A gagging sound burbled up from somewhere near the center of her throat, not so different from her laughter. He tightened his grip, and stared down at her. But what did the stranger see?

Perhaps he saw that weightless spark of life that illuminated the woman's eyes even in the darkness. Maybe he saw her trust. Or perhaps he saw in her eyes the same puzzlement he had earlier that day seen floating in his own reflected gaze. Maybe it was love he saw, or something like it — something so contrary to all rational appetite, to all informed experience, to any reasoned calculus of what the world was owed, that it tripped him, and he fell. He let her go.

The woman coughed. A strand of drool leaked from her mouth, and tears leaked from her eyes. She did not wipe them away, did not even lift her hands to rub her throat. She lay still, and stared at him, her gaze expressing something more like pity than reproach. He stared back until tears rolled down his cheeks also, and he hid his face in his hands. His lips quivered. He sputtered out the words
I can't
. He choked and coughed and mouthed the word
forgive
, the words
forgive me
. He did not speak those words aloud, but that did not matter, as the woman could not hear. And though the room was too dark for her to see his mouth, she felt a tear fall warm from the tip of his nose onto her bare throat, and she lifted her palm to his face, to wipe his tears away and comfort him. The stranger took it like a slap. He leapt from the bed and ran naked into the night.

The sky had cleared of smoke. The stars stared down, hard and blue and far away. The stranger ran, and kept on running.

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Unclothed, the stranger ran off into the burning world. I don't believe we'll hear from him again. There are those who cannot offer forgiveness, those who can't accept it. And those, like our brokedown hero, whose pride is so great and so fragile, that to even once lower themselves to beg forgiveness can be sufficient to destroy them. I pray that I am not so proud.

I sit at my desk, feet crossed beneath my chair, my papers again neatly stacked around me. The couch is empty. The dictionary closed, returned to its place on the shelf between the thesaurus and a field guide to common birds. Speaking of which, this morning a pigeon landed on my windowsill. Purple-headed, it turned two times with tiny, almost dainty steps incommensurate to its rounded bulk, and began preening its fat and feathered self. Then it noticed me less than a yard away on the other side of the glass, and flew off in panicked flurry. But the pigeons have long since gone to sleep wherever pigeons sleep. Perhaps on someone else's windowsill. It's a Tuesday and it's night already, so no one is preaching in the park. I hear only the usual sirens, the usual calamities. The ordinary apocalypses that join to make a day. Fires and floods, the tragedies of field mice and birds with broken wings. A fright suffered by a pigeon. A fruit fly's lonely death. The giantness of love. The smallness of our bodies. We eat and hope to mate. Hunger flows through everything. Call it whatever you like. Call it love if you prefer. The earth keeps spinning, a world among worlds among worlds, and all of them expanding, all of them reaching out for something else. Nothing begins and nothing ends. There are no boundaries to anything. To any things.

But I have to end this story somewhere. Soon I'll print this page and stack it with the others. I'll listen to my computer cease to hum. I'll watch the monitor blink dim. I'll get up, switch off the light, turn my key in the lock, wait for the elevator, lose patience, take the stairs. I'll go home, walk the cracked concrete path from the sidewalk to the porch, unlatch the gate, turn my key in yet another lock, pull the door closed behind me. I'll pull it closed on all of this and, forgive me, on you as well. Maybe she'll be awake.

Here the story ends. Somewhere else, others carry on. I told the stranger once that this wasn't about him anymore. That may have seemed cruel, but I was being kind. The truth is, it never was. There's always somewhere else. Look there instead. Somewhere else, not far, the bagman struggles to breathe life into the old man's age-worn lungs. Somewhere he fails. Somewhere the old man lets out a final cough that just may have been a laugh. Somewhere the bagman tries to walk unburdened. Somewhere a little fat boy washes the soot from his hands and face and constructs a sandwich for his grandmother: ham, tomato, mustard, no grubs. Somewhere a girl with long hair finds her father's car again, wipes the ash from its windshield and wonders what she's wished for. Somewhere three bald men wrestle in the embers. Somewhere Pigeon can't stop weeping. Somewhere the fires burn. They won't burn long. Somewhere else it rains. This is nothing new, no end and no beginning. These things happen all the time. Somewhere the deaf-mute sits among her troop of dolls, her hands crossed in her lap, and wonders what, if anything, she's lost. She tries to think of water and the surface of the sea. Somewhere already the wind blows hard and clears the ash and smoke from the sky. The stars shine bright above her. Some are blue, some are yellow and some are almost red. Some are hard and some are blurred. Some are not stars at all, but other planets and the moons of other planets, satellites, reflective trash that spins and spins. The moon winks. An owl hoots. A hummingbird sleeps hidden on a branch. A bullfrog belches love into the breeze. The stars shiver around her shoulders. Some are far and some are close. Some are very close. She reaches out and grabs one. It's too hot to hold. She tosses it from palm to palm and lobs it back into the sky. She grabs another, and she tosses it to you. Don't just sit there. Catch.
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 Too slow. You let it fall! The star crashes to the floor, explodes. Fire races everywhere. Again the whole world burns. The page burns, the paper, the ink. The story burns. My computer burns. Magnetic zeros and ones flashing, sparking, sputtering out. The acrid smell of plastic melting, of zeros burning, melting. Flames trot across the carpet. They climb the mini-blinds to the camera on the wall. The walls burn. My office burns. And the broken elevator and the stairs and the bathroom down the hall. Bricks and concrete blocks aflame. The park burns, and the lake in the park and the pitted asphalt of the street. Even the potholes are burning. So I stay on the sidewalk, safe. I'm no fool. Or at least not that kind of fool. The buses are burning, so I have to walk. Sometimes I run to avoid the racing flames, to avoid burning up like the streets and the buses and the birds blazing through the sky like comets. I climb the hill, which of course is burning, and pass the bakery, also burning, and the neighbors' houses, all aflame. Only my house is not burning. It's fine, undamaged, sitting squat and stucccoed on its hillside beside the burning streets and all the burning houses and even the sky on fire now, the space between the stars on fire so that the entire sky is just one star, one big sun, one great celestial flame from horizon to horizon, except that the earth is burning too—every square inch of it save my house and the sidewalk in front of it—so what does it mean to talk of horizons anymore? Of up or down, here and beyond? What does it mean to talk of anything but burning? They're all there, gathered on the sidewalk, all of them. The stranger, the bagman, the deaf-mute, the old man, Pigeon, the preacher, the long-haired girl, the four nasty little boys and the fat boy's grandma, the three bald-headed men, the twin cripples, Martha also known as Marty, Gabriel, Michael, the prostitute, the man with the eye patch, all of them, even the woman with whom I share a bed. She's awake, standing off to the side and smiling, her arms crossed and her head tilted back and to the side like she's waiting for me to kiss her, or ask her to dance. They all look better. The bagman's wearing khakis and a V-neck cashmere sweater and his hair is trim and shiny with pomade. He looks a little lost still, but he smells like soap now, like Dove and Prell, and he's not carrying any bags. The old man is young again. He's wearing a shortstop's uniform, spitting tobacco juice into the dirt, winking. Pigeon is laughing, clowning, jumping up and down. His mom is with him. She tells him to quit fooling, but there's a softness to her voice and you can tell she doesn't mean it. The three bald-headed men have let their hair grow out. They're wearing turtlenecks, and reading Rilke. The long-haired girl has a buzz cut now. She's smoking Marlboros and glowing with tough, solitary cool. The stranger's wounds have healed. His suit is white again, and flawless. His beard is white too and there's an odd sort of gleam to him. He's standing behind the deaf-mute woman. His arms are wrapped around her waist. He's kissing her neck and whispering in her ear. Shock 'n' awe, he's saying, Shock 'n' awe, and he's nibbling at her earlobe and she's giggling and squirming and struggling to turn and kiss him back — she's not deaf anymore, or mute — but he's faster than she is and that's the game he's playing, to kiss her and love her and pretend not to let her love him back. I'm on the porch. It's funny, because I'm out here on the sidewalk with the rest of them, but I can see myself there on the porch as well, struggling with the latch on the gate, trying to get out. I look smaller than I thought I did, and not just physically. I mean I'm every bit as tall as I always am, but from the outside, from here on the sidewalk looking at myself over there on the porch I'm somehow less imposing than I imagined. Maybe it's because I'm bent over, hunched fighting with the latch. What's wrong with it? The camera above the door blinks red, watching me watch myself. The flames crack and spit behind me and I can feel their heat on the backs of my legs and the stranger says, Come on, join us, and he sounds sincere, cheerful even, and all of them are smiling now, all of us are. We're waving our hands, encouraging him. Me. Encouraging me. Come on, they say. Lift the latch, we say. Come join us. Lift it. He's trying. I'm trying. I want to help him but I can't seem to move. I'm watching myself trying, watching myself look up at all of us encouraging me, encouraging him, and I know he wants to join us, I want to join them out there on the sidewalk beside the burning street, but the latch is stuck, the gate is stuck, and they're not helping me, they're just standing there and I can't tell if they're mocking me or not, if they really want me out there or if they're just enjoying my clumsiness, my helplessness, but I don't care, I want to join them, to get through this gate to where I am and where they are, over there, looking so joyful in each other's company, but I can't. He can't. The latch is stuck. I can't get through the gate.