Ether (2 page)

“I try,” she said, her eyebrows raised. “Lord knows I try.”

“Lord knows,” he agreed.

Marty stared at the bottles arrayed in tiers behind the bar. She did not take her eyes from them until she finished talking. “I quit my job today,” she began, blinking at the recollection. “That's why I'm here. Celebrating. If you couldn't tell. I don't know why I quit it, but I did. Sometimes you need a change. That's what I told myself. Funny thing is though, it was the best job I ever had. Really. Good pay, the boss was nice enough. Or almost nice. I liked the other people, some of them. It was fine. But I woke up this morning and I could not bear to go in. I just couldn't. So I went back to sleep and when the phone rang I told him I quit. That's it, I just quit. Then I came here. Sometimes you need a change.”

Marty hugged herself for a moment. She scratched again at her nose and lifted her glass to her lips. There was nothing in it but ice. “My mother died,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Yesterday.”

The stranger offered no response.

She fumbled in her purse and came out with a small chromed plastic tube. She lit another cigarette and, between puffs, applied the lipstick to her lips. Narrowing her eyes, she considered the figure perched beside her. “You believe in god?” she asked.

“Believe?”

“Yeah, believe. Is that a personal question? Cause every time I ask someone that I feel like it's a personal question, like I just asked for your bank statements or if you like sniffing panties. Can I just ask you that? Is that too much?”

“You can ask.”

“Good. Cause sometimes I don't want to talk about the weather, or the lottery, or whatever. How cute my dog is. Sometimes . . .” She didn't finish the thought, but took one last drag from her cigarette and sat while it smoldered to the filter in the ashtray. “It wasn't my mother that died,” she said. “It was my little girl.” She covered her face with her hands.

She did not sob, just quivered slightly. The stranger made no attempt to console her. He stared without expression at his own reflected image among the bottles in the mirror across the bar. The song on the jukebox faded out. Silence spread to the corners of the barroom like an angry, buzzing haze. You could hear, or almost hear, or could imagine you could hear, the camera above the pool table swiveling on its mount. The fat woman who had been dancing alone stopped dancing, but not until a minute or so after the music had ceased to play. With a jangle of keys and a muttered “That's it then,” she stumbled to the door.

Marty lifted her face from her hands. Her eyes were red, but they were dry, and her cheeks were not streaked with tears. “Don't worry,” she said. “Nobody died.” She shook the ice in her glass. “Everything's just fine.” She swiveled towards him on her stool and flashed a quick, sad smile. She put a hand on his knee, then pulled it back again.

He turned to her and spoke. “Do you?” he asked.

“Do I what?” she said.

“Do you believe? In god?

She knit her brow. “That's nice of you to ask,” she said, “but it's really none of your fucking business.” Then Marty laughed a high and wheezy laugh, winked, and took his hand in hers. “I'm joking, sweetheart. You can ask me anything you want.”

The stranger pulled his hand away. She whispered hurriedly in his ear. “Listen, you like blow? Cause I got some in my bag.”

Without waiting for a response, she grabbed him by his thumb and led him to the back of the bar and through a door labeled “Gals.” She locked the feeble hook and eye behind him. As she rummaged through her bag, facing the sink and looking up at him every few seconds in the soap-stained mirror as if it were necessary to reassure herself that he had not already disappeared, she reached one palm behind her and rested it shakily on his chest. Her hand dropped down and gripped his belt. He took a single step back.

“Don't let me scare you,” she said, locating at last in the cluttered depths of her purse a small pocket mirror and a plasticine bag of clumpy white powder. She laughed weakly. “I scare all the good ones away.” She turned around to face him. “Only the bad ones stick around,” she said. “And the worse ones.”

She tapped the powder onto the glass of the mirror, crushing any pebbled bits with the edge of her drivers license and cutting the resulting pile into four short lines. “Got a bill?” she said.

He pulled one from his pocket, crumpled like the others.

“That won't work.” She produced a crisp twenty of her own, rolled it into a thin straw and sucked one line into each of her nostrils before offering him the mirror. He shook his head.

“You don't want?” The surprise in her eyes fell away swiftly. “Why'd you come in here,” she asked with a coy grin, “if you don't want?”

Marty flushed at her own forwardness, cocked her head back and snorted. She squeezed shut her eyes as the drug sped from synapse to synapse. She shivered. “You're gonna be nice to me, aren't you?”

She didn't wait for an answer, but lowered her head to sniff the remaining lines. Before she could, he shot out an arm and took her by the throat with his hand. Her pocket mirror bounced on the linoleum. White powder dusted her boots. He began to squeeze. She jammed her knee into his scrotum and when he doubled over, she caught him beneath the chin with an uppercut that sent him sprawling onto the toilet behind him.

“Fucking freak!” she yelled, then grabbed her purse, spat in his face, and slammed the door behind her.

The stranger stood, straightened his jacket and his pants and splashed his face with water from the sink. It was brown, and the sink was clogged with cigarette butts, what looked to be a tampon. From behind the door, he could hear the woman yelling. “That fucking fucker tried to fucking kill me,” she shrieked. A second or two later, the door swung open and a white light shattered between his temples. When he came to, the barkeep was carrying him out, gripping him by the back of the neck. His feet dragged behind him like a doll's. The barkeep opened the door and tossed him into the parking lot.

He lifted himself onto his elbows. His eyes shone with rage. “Damn you,” he hissed. “Damn you to hell.”

Standing in the doorway, the bartender laughed. “Shit,” he said. “That's a good one.” And with that he spat a full tablespoon of tobacco juice onto what was left of the stranger's white suit, and closed the door behind him.

In the darkened streets she made her rounds. The night was cool, the streets quiet. But it was not the heat and certainly not the noise that kept the woman awake. She could neither hear nor speak, and some nights she also could not sleep. Some nights, and some days too, swarms of sharp-winged flies invaded her skull, entering through her ears and nose and through the corners of her mouth and circling madly in the small black-orange room between her forehead and the rear wall of her cranium. The only thing to do was walk, so she gathered her skirts about her and climbed the embankment into the streets.

The night felt safer than the day. Darkness, the woman knew, has its privileges. Blindness too, and even deafness. At night there were no cars to hit her on the avenues, no looming trucks, no people to scold her for one or another imagined sin. There were fewer men to pull her into alleys, no bored policemen choosing their targets from behind mirrored shades, no sneakered women with clipboards and government name tags, lips pursed in pity but eyes dead to care. She had no fear of rats and the dogs left her alone.

She crouched to pass through a hole in the fence and cross from the concrete lip of the embankment through the tangled weeds to the lots between the warehouses. She walked down the middle of the potholed street. Searching the walls for cameras, she saw none. Steel shutters had been pulled closed over the loading bays. Even the high windows of the warehouses had been painted black or gray. At night the buildings had no eyes. Their mouths were sewn shut. This was a comfort to her — to pass unseen, unspoken to — and also, of course, a torment. Invisibility has its costs. If no one saw her, she asked herself, was she even there?

But the woman was not entirely alone. It hardly counts as company, but she soon came across a man. She almost stumbled over him where he lay curled on the ground beside a dumpster. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. In lieu of a blanket, he wore a lumpy army-surplus jacket. He wheezed in short, troubled breaths, hugging an empty bottle like an infant to his breast. She tiptoed around him — wary, keeping her feet and ankles at least an arm's length from his sleep-twitching hands — and lifted the corner of the dumpster's lid. It was empty save a cardboard box, which was also empty, so she rushed away and did not slow until she had put a block between them. Only once she had gazed back and seen the shadow of him there unmoving, like a lump in the pitted asphalt, did she allow herself to pause and pull a stone from her shoe.

A block away, she stopped again and watched the insects circling in the inverted funnels of yellow light that hung down from the streetlamps to her right and to her left. She tried to count them but soon gave up. There were too many and they flickered about too quickly. Some of them were moths. All of them spiraled expectantly upward, abandoning for this one bright chance at transcendence all the screaming demands of sustenance and procreation. Who can blame them? A bat flitted from lamp to lamp and picked them off.

She clanked open the lids of the dumpsters in the alley beside a produce warehouse and found a full crate of pears wedged among the bulbous trash bags. The fruits were too ripe and too bruised to sell, but not to eat. She heaved out the crate and laid it in the shadows at the edge of the alley where she could find it again on her way back. She took one pear with her, biting through its browning flesh. The juice ran down her chin and onto her chest through the open collars of her shirts. She smiled at its sweetness, chewing as she walked.

The woman passed a sprawling cinderblock building indistinguishable from the rest but which she knew to be a distribution hub for plastic toys, a sort of vast nursery and holding pen for injection-molded infants, ponies, soldiers and bears. She ducked to dodge a swiveling camera, climbed a fence and tried the dumpsters. Two were locked, one was empty and a fourth was filled only with pink plastic shavings, shredded paper and the crusted styrofoam remains of workers' meals — no dolls or parts of dolls.

Around the corner, on the other side of the now-sleepy highway, behind the wholesale flower mart, she found a mound of discarded bouquets of the most extraordinary blossoms: petals like meteors, like velvet curtains, like bayonets; pistils like furred stag's legs, like spotted towers, stigmata that looked soft and wide enough to sleep on. Their stems had broken, so the florists deemed them ruined. She could carry at least two bouquets, she figured, stacked atop the pears. As she knelt to choose among them, she saw to her surprise that one of the flowers was twitching. It was a huge, drooping, pudendal bloom, red, yellow and black and pulsing furiously as if wired to a miniature engine. She lifted it, and the flower fell still. On the pavement beneath, she found a tiny bird. It was a hummingbird, no bigger than her thumb. One of its wings lay outstretched beneath it like another strange petal. Its other wing beat with such speed that she could barely see it. For all its effort, the bird could not fly.

She scooped the bird up with her fingers and folded its broken wing against its tiny, humming body. It weighed less than the flower that had covered it. In her hand, the hummingbird was still. The wing ceased its fluttering. Its shiny, black, pinprick of an eye did not express pain or panic or anything at all. But even in the dull, sepia light of the streetlamp, the bird's plumage shimmered from green to red to gold and seemed to be all of those colors at once. She stroked its head with the pad of her index finger and placed it gently in the breast pocket of her outermost shirt. She picked two bouquets of flowers and went back to fetch the fruit.

Walking home, she stopped every few paces, set down her load and lifted the bird from her pocket. Its heart whirred like a turbine in her palm.

The stranger limped down the highway in the dark. After a few miles of rutted asphalt he came across a gas station. It was closed and deserted but for the mosquitoes that circled in the flickering light above the pumps. He fed a pocketful of nickels into the pay phone in the corner of the parking lot, beside the ice machine. He let it ring fourteen times before he hung up. The nickels clanged down again and bounced rolling to the blacktop. He sat on the ground among them and leaned his back against the post on which the phone was hung. Above the phone, a camera blinked red. He slept for half an hour without snoring, his face untroubled by dreams. Then he tried again, depositing nickel after nickel into the coin slot until at last the phone began to ring. Fourteen more rings passed, then fourteen more. At last a hoarse voice answered. He asked for Gabriel.

“He's asleep.”

“So wake him.” He heard silence, then a click. He dug around for more nickels, dialed again.

“What,” the hoarse voice growled.

“Gabriel,” he said. “Wake him. I'll make it worth your while.”

There was a pause. “And who the fuck are you?”

“Take a chance. Believe me. Good will come your way. Do this one thing for me.”

“He gets up early, around six.” Again, a click, then a dial tone. The stranger crouched on the asphalt again, and slept beneath the phone until the sun rose. This time he slept uneasily, his body shaking, his fists clenched, shadows of dreams chasing themselves across his face.

As soon as he woke he called again. The desk clerk made him wait while he sent up to Gabriel's room, and he had to feed the phone once more with coins. At last Gabriel picked up. “Gabriel,” he said. “It's me.”

Gabriel said nothing for a long while. “Why are you calling me?” he finally said.