Ether (16 page)

I go inside and pull a sheet from the closet. I can't say why, but I don't want to touch his naked skin. Or I don't want it to touch me. I roll him onto the sheet, lift him up and bring him in. He's as light as a child, brittle and gangly, as if no tendons connect his bones. I can feel the heat of him through the sheet and even in the dark of the living room I can see the fever sweat beading on his temples and brow. His hair is damp with it. He doesn't wake.

I lay him out on the couch and wipe the sweat from his forehead with a corner of the sheet. His breath rattles slow and uneven through his nose. I sip my drink. I stroke his beard, rest my palm on his brow. “Listen,” I begin, though I know he cannot hear me, “The little boy found everything. He found the dog. It had eaten the rabbit and been stung by the snake. It looked as it had before he'd kissed it: a greasy towel hung sloppily over wire hangers, broken pots. The hawk in turn had eaten the snake, but the man and the woman had toppled the tree in which it made its nest. It broke a wing. The vulture had taken care of the rest.

“The little boy swam. He scoured the sea for the fish and the shark, but he did not find them anywhere. Sitting on the shore, he noticed that the skin on his arms and his legs and his boyish belly had broken out in small but angry boils. His eyes stung. His lungs hurt when he breathed. He understood: the man and woman had poisoned the sea, as men and women do. Thus the absence of the fish and the shark, and of the man and the woman as well.

“The little boy heard the vulture laugh. He turned and saw it sitting in the low branch of a tall tree, just where the dunes gave way to swollen hills. And in a valley between two hills, immediately beneath the tree in which the vulture sat, the little boy found the little girl. Her arms and legs were bare and thin and speckled with bruises and the dotted lines of scrapes. In her hands she held the first of the little boy's creations, the bird. Climbing a tree — the same scabby tree in which the vulture now waited — she had found the bird's nest and grabbed it before it could fly away. She had clutched it to her chest and scaled the branches in reverse. And sitting there on the ground, just moments before the little boy arrived, curiosity had compelled the little girl to twist the bird's tiny head around, to see how far it would turn. It turned all the way around.

“She sat, puzzled by the stillness of the thing in her hand, the tiny wings that had so recently been atwitch with frustrated flight. ‘It won't move,' she said to the boy.

“From the tree, the vulture laughed again. The little boy turned to look at it. It was much fatter than it had been when he'd built it.

“He looked back at the girl, who looked down at the bird. Tears washed clean lines through the dirt that smudged her cheeks. The little boy was not able to cry anymore, but standing there between the little girl and the vulture, he felt a grief deeper than any he had previously felt. Though he was only a boy, he was wise enough to understand that he himself was made of want, and that though he had tried to build something other than himself, something that might fill his absences, he had succeeded only at building more want, want chasing want chasing want, like the tears that raced down the girl's cheekbones to her chin. But love is also want.

“The little boy had nowhere else to go, so he sat beside the little girl. And there the four of them remained — the little boy, the little girl, the dead bird and the live one — until the sun's light dimmed and the sky's smaller lights switched on one by one. Some of the lights were the planets that the little boy had made. They swung in wide ellipses round his head. Others though, were faraway stars with orbits of their own, planets of their own, and even moons. The space between the stars belonged to no one, and as many stars as there were — as many moons and planets and belts of silent rocks — its bright blackness took up most of the sky. The little boy sat. The little girl sat. The vulture sat. The dead bird too. Above them swirled the sky. Some stars blinked out. Others exploded. Here and there, new stars shined.”

I lift the stranger's sleeping head and slide a pillow beneath it. I spread a blanket over him. “That's the end,” I say. “Good night.”

The stranger's fever returned. All day he muttered, cursed, and spat. He thrashed and kicked when the woman came too near. Sometimes he shook his index finger in the air, his fist squeezed tight, issuing decrees to the dim. What words did he pronounce? His throat was parched — she could not make him drink — and his tongue was thick with fever, but had you been there to hear, and brave enough to lean in close, you would have heard a lot of things, strange, self-serving apologies directed at the stars, justifications so thick with self-deceit that you'd need Q-tips doused with oven cleaner to cleanse your ears on hearing them. Once he sat up straight and the film covering his eyes seemed to clear for a moment. He laughed a high, phlegmy laugh and said, “So the doctor tells the priest, ‘You're gonna be just fine, the only thing is you'll have to keep this bag attached to you at all times.'” But then all energy abandoned him. His eyes blinked closed and his spine went limp again. He slept for half a day, waking only to moan, roll his head and clack his jaws.

The woman sat beside him. Had she been able to come up with the words, she would have tried to comfort him with what little truth she felt she had a claim on. As a girl, she had seen the ocean once. She had sat in the back of her mother's boyfriend's car for hour after hour. She'd had to pee. She didn't remember which boyfriend it had been, but she remembered the ridged blue vinyl of the seats, sticky with sweat beneath her thighs, the metal buckle of the seat belt hot from the sun and burning the inside of her wrist, her bladder near bursting as treetops and clouds floated past outside. Then she looked out the window and saw that the trees and the houses and billboards had all disappeared and there was nothing outside the car but the huge and patient green and rolling sea. What was it doing out there? She still saw it in her dreams, saw how it toyed with the land and the air, and had she been able, she would have told her guest about it. She would have told him that the sea was deep and that the air rose up forever above it, but that the line separating ocean from atmosphere is thinner than a line, is always moving, always shifting, always changing. She would have tried to tell him that the same is true for everything worth anything, that below it all is dark and cold, and above it's just endless yawning emptiness, and that that line which is not a line is never ever still and never fixed but it is always there and if it were not, water would not be water and air would not be air. But she could not tell him this, or anything, and she knew he would not listen if she could. Instead she mopped the sweat from his brow whenever he would let her.

In the evening, he slept, and she lay at his side. When the shakes took hold of him again, she again stretched her body on top of his. She held his wrists. She placed her mouth over his, and felt his breath on her lips and on her teeth. She kissed his eyelids, and when his trembling at last stopped, she sucked the stranger's tongue into her mouth. He did not stir. With her eyelashes she brushed at his nose and cheeks. She lifted the covers and traced with her finger his jutting bones. The sharpness of his hips. The hollows beneath them. She sucked at his lip and licked the dry roof of his mouth. She lifted her many shirts until her heavy breasts fell forth. She lowered one to the strangers' mouth, but he lay still. She tried the other one. With her fingers, she pried open his lips, and placed a nipple between them. He lay inert, so she took his fingers in her mouth. She ran her breasts over his eyelids, then down along his throat and chest. She rubbed her nipples against his nipples, her groin against his groin. She felt him stirring there, so she stroked him with her palm, squatted over him and lifted up her many skirts. His eyes blinked open as she lowered herself on top of him. His jaw stiffened. “Don't touch,” he groaned, but then his eyes rolled upwards and his head rolled back, and he tugged her down around him hard, his fists balled on her wide hips. His body jerked twice into hers. His face twisted as if overcome by sudden agony. Whatever force had briefly lent him animation drained out of him, suddenly and entirely. She licked the sweat from his chest. His eyelids fluttered when she kissed them. They slept.

They felt the smoke before they smelled it. A fit of coughing overtook the old man and he had to sit and, gasping, wait it out. The bagman helped him up. The cockatiel stopped talking. Then the light changed and they began to smell the burning in the air. They did not know what it was or who it was, but they all felt certain they were getting close to something. The preacher nervously fingered the trigger of his bullhorn and every few seconds a burble of static belched from its gray mouth.

A cloud of birds flew over them. Not just one species, but many intermixed. Gulls and crows and screaming jays. A great blue heron, its long neck folded, flapped its giant wings. Above it flew a finch. Doves flew next to swallows, sparrows beside hawks. Enough of them that for a space of several seconds the humans advancing beneath could feel the air chill as the shadows of the birds passed over. They all flew in the same direction, away from the smoke and the flames toward which the pilgrims walked, unknowing. The cockatiel squawked and snapped on its master's shoulder. It spread its yellow wings and, without a further damning word, launched itself into the air to join its kind in flight.

The woman in the pink sweatsuit fell to her knees, her mouth stuck open like an italic letter
O
. The old man helped her stand and put his arm around her, ignoring the milky strings of bird crap that had crusted on her shoulders. “Don't worry,” he lied. “He'll be back.”

But the woman did not believe him. She pushed away his arm and spun suddenly around. Eyes on the smoke-clogged heavens, she ran after her pet.

After that, they saw no more birds. They saw no squirrels, no rats, no deer or feral dogs. Even the insects appeared to have evacuated. The pilgrims marched onward through the woods, the twins rearing to force their wheelchairs over roots and fallen tree limbs. They heard something crashing through the leaves. A skinny little boy ran towards them, his head bobbing furiously up and down. The boy's palms were blackened with soot. He held them out on thin brown arms stretched far in front of him as he ran, as if trying to push something away, to hurl it from his grasp. His face was wet with sweat or tears and though he was running, his eyes were squeezed shut. He was gone before they could stop him. They turned to watch Pigeon's little brown body disappear through the trees. The greyhound turned tail and scuttled after him.

They still could not see the fire, but when they began to feel its heat the man with the eye patch started to mutter to himself. The muttering steadily rose in volume and in pitch until the man was spitting curses. The preacher twirled around to face him and when he did the man with the eye patch backed away and stumbled, then brushed himself off and began walking hurriedly backwards in the direction from which they'd come. The twins exchanged quick glances and wheeled away behind him.

“I gotta go,” said the long-haired girl to no one in particular.

“We're getting close,” the old man told her with a wink.

She frowned. “To what?” she asked.

The old man laughed. “That is the question, isn't it?” But his laughter turned quickly to coughing and while he was bent there, his hands on his knees, the long-haired girl said one word, “bye,” and turned and walked away. The bagman swung his arm around the old man's shoulders, and the two of them struggled to catch up with the preacher and the prostitute.

The four remaining seekers climbed a gentle slope up and out of the woods to a clearing littered with bottleglass and sun-faded cans that had once held soup and chili beans and beer and potted meat. The flames stretched to the horizon. Directly in front of the pilgrims lay a field of dry grass and dirt. Everything was coated with ash — each blade of grass and dandelion leaf, rocks already scorched by years of lonely cook fires — as if a decade of dust had been allowed to collect overnight in a doorless, breezeless room. Here and there flames danced in pockets where cinders had drifted on the wind and ignited the weeds. Across the field the avenues reached outward, endlessly straight, the buildings that lined them crackling, folding and falling to the flames. In the distance, the flames jumped high into the sky, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, expanding their dominion with every breath of wind. The ground shook with a thud as somewhere out of sight a gas truck exploded.

The pilgrims stopped. The bagman unburdened himself and dropped his bags on the ground. The old man began to cough again. He had to sit. “Oh shit,” he said, shaking his head at the burning earth spread out before them, chortling between wheezes, “I take back everything I ever said.”

The prostitute, who had been trailing her usual safe distance behind, stood suddenly in front of the three men. She did not stop there and did not hesitate, but straightened her skirt and her halter top and with great dignity walked straight off across the field toward the flames. A spasm of coughing bent the old man in two. The preacher nodded to the bagman. His eye twitched, and his nose, and his cheekbones one by one, but he did not stutter when he spoke. “Come on then,” the preacher said.

The bagman did not respond, so the preacher turned and followed the prostitute towards the fire. He lifted the bullhorn to his mouth and began to preach into the smoke in a smooth and even voice. “The steadfast love of the lord never ceases,” the bagman heard him expound. “His mercies never come to an end.” He watched the two of them recede into the distance, skirting the flames that blossomed in the reeds. He stared at the words written on the back of the preacher's sandwich board until they grew too small for him to read them. Beside him, the old man clutched his chest and retched.