Ether Read Online Free Page A

a park bench, scratch his big, grey belly and toast the world, wink wink. Toast the squirrels and the ants and the cameras hidden in the trees and the weeds that grew in the cracks in the cement, widening the cracks, turning cement to sand, to dust. Toast the clouds and the wind and the birds that swam squawking from tree branch to tree branch, and the squawks that lingered in the pulsing space between the branches. Raise the bottle to the smell of jasmine in the springtime, the first-rain smell of fall, the smell of urine all year long. Toast the clicking of heels on the sidewalk, the hum of passing cars outside the park, the muttering and whispering of the men and women who had sat here yesterday and all the days before that, a child’s voice somewhere behind him, the child’s ball as it escaped the child’s hands and bounced away down the concrete path
    But the joviality was hard to sustain. There were too many things. They stared him down. Vodka can only get you so far. Invariably, it would cause him to fall asleep, a not so unpleasant outcome if it were not that he always eventually woke, and usually at some middle level of despair. Not quite the bottom floor — to which he felt no desire to return — but still much too near the basement. Mouth dry, head throbbing with questions: even if it was a joke, whose joke was it? More important, on whom? And joke or calamity, if a thing was no longer itself, if its skin had been somehow stretched or shrunk and altered, what was it? What was anything in this mad, sick blur? Could he rest his weight on this earth and know that it would bear him?
    These questions, of course, do not pertain solely to the bagman. I don’t mind admitting that they’re mine as well — how else could I have known to write them, to attribute them to him? But the bagman, limited as he was by the four rounded corners of his skull, had no way of knowing this and tried on occasion to check in with others, to determine if he was alone in his concerns. He was not successful. Other people, he found, did not wish to speak with him. Approached, they scurried from him with mouths clamped shut. As if he were something contagious. (His code of dress, it should be said, did not conform to prevailing social norms. Nor, perhaps more crucially, did his approach to hygiene.) And even if people had stopped to listen, had opened themselves to him fully, the truth was that words fought him with even greater avidity than stone-mute things. They flitted between his ears like drunken moths, turning to vapor before he could force them through his mouth. If it cost him a near-Herculean effort to construct and impart the simplest declarative proposition, what hope could he have to convey such vast and metaphysical quandaries?
    Nonetheless, he gathered evidence. He hoped for a tribunal, a chance to make his case. Before whom, he wasn’t sure. Nor against whom. He planned to collect one of everything. That was his original intent. To make a comprehensive case. To be able to display at least one instance of every single thing, like Noah if Noah had herded all the beasts in the world up the gangplank and onto the ark for purposes of prosecution rather than preservation. As evidence. He was limited by finances, of which he had none. This restricted him to things found abandoned or which he could handily nick. And to things small enough to carry, as he had no secure abode of his own in which to store them.
    Isn’t this counterintuitive? Wouldn’t he be moved to flee the things that menaced him, and not to hug them to him? Well it’s hard to get away from things. Even in sleep, even in stupor, there they are, stubborn as your shadow. And the bagman, as you shall see, was a man of considerable courage. He dodged the past (if dodge is the right word for his careful self-immurement), but he flinched at nothing else. He ran bravely forward, if never back. He handled each of the objects he