Ether Read Online Free

said. “Wake him. I’ll make it worth your while.”
    There was a pause. “And who the fuck are you?”
    â€œTake a chance. Believe me. Good will come your way. Do this one thing for me.”
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œI need a favor, Gabriel.”
    â€œTry someone else. I’m all out.”
    â€œJust one last time. For old time’s sake.”
    â€œForget it.”
    â€œThank you, Gabriel. I really mean that. I’ll be there tomorrow. I won’t forget this.”
    â€œI said forget it,” Gabriel said. “It’s over.” He hung up. The stranger hung up too, smiled to himself, and started off down the road.
The problem with things.
    Things were in crisis. The sun still shone. Daily it rose. Daily it set. The moon worked its circuit and also the stars. If you squinted your eyes, everything seemed all right. But things did not fit themselves. Though they continued to function as if nothing had changed. That was the worst of it. The bagman did not know how else to put it except that things no longer appeared to be contained by their own outlines. Ordinary things. Sidewalks, cars, what have you. They seemed too tight, too baggy, ill-meshed to one another, all bunched up. They sat wrong with themselves. The textures seemed false, the smells manufactured. The colors were off. Things appeared to mock themselves. Every single thing seemed an imperfect parody of its own essence.
    It had not always been so. The bagman had not always been a bagman. That much he was able to acknowledge. He’d had a name once, though he no longer cared to recollect it. He had been a citizen of the most ordinary sort, an unquestioning believer in the thingness of things, in their coherence and singularity. He had shopped in shopping malls, gone to bed in a bedroom, dined, at times, in diners. He had worn ordinary clothes and smelled of ordinary soap. Pressed khakis. V-neck sweaters. Dove. Prell. But his life had been cleaved by an incident that he was only willing to let himself think of — and then cautiously, as if handling a bare wire that might be live, with steel pliers and wet hands — as The Incident. And the only thing that you or I will get to know about The Incident is that it happened, that it was done. Those two words contained for the bagman all the uncontainable enormity of the past tense. He used them to construct a shade with which to cover from view the actual event and the chain of events that followed it — the infinite, incomprehensible connections between them, the mute stupidity of time — a shade that served to hide all but the fuzziest contours of the bagman’s pre-bag life. What had been, the bagman knew, no longer was. The Incident, like the astral phenomenon inaccurately called a black hole, sucked all he knew inside it and stranded him alone in the world, hollow and hungry, a bearded, malodorous, birth-defected newborn, lost and already slightly broken. Around the edges of that hole that was not a hole, the bagman felt a deep, thirsting anxiety, and something akin to guilt.
    In better moods, he tried to laugh. He rarely drank, but when he did he found it easier. And by it, I mean, well, all of it. He could pretend it was a joke and that he was in on the joke. Pick up a pint of Karlov from the Korean man behind the plexiglass cage at the corner store, sip on