Ether Read Online Free Page B

harvested as an exterminator treats a rat he’s caught alive, with a thick admixture of revulsion, curiosity, and affection bred by bondage to a task.
    He laid up his gleanings in big plastic trash bags and carried them with him everywhere. He filled one bag and then another. Three he could carry, but for more than that he needed a cart. Something existed in the makeup of police officers, he had learned, some broken neural switch, frayed fascicles perhaps, or a congenitally torn meninx: they did not like to see a man push a cart. Their reactions were unpredictable and tended toward extremes. It didn’t matter. He quickly found that there was insufficient regularity even among things of any given category — socks, for instance, or rubber bands — to justify his original ambition. He could argue his case just as effectively if his body of evidence consisted entirely of rubber bands, every rubber band being distinct from every other rubber band and all of them, every single one, failing in some inchoate but nonetheless essential manner to actually be a rubber band. So he culled his collection and left the cart in an alley.
    To save his back the trouble of hauling inessential weight, he confined himself to objects he deemed especially illustrative of the general crisis. These objects were not necessarily deformed or damaged in any describable fashion, though many were. Some were new and spotless exemplars of their type, still shrink-wrapped even, and it was as such that he chose them, if only to prove that, as an uncle had told him many forgotten years before, you can’t spitshine a turd.
    It did occur to him with nagging persistence that the root of the problem might lie closer to home, that the collected artifacts of creation were as they’d always been, but he had somehow slipped his boundaries. It could be, he realized, a problem of perception, though his eyes, at least, were fine. He decided not to pursue that possibility. It led him with excruciating inevitability to the high and crenellated parapets encircling The Incident, and to a painful question: if he could muster no faith in the world or in any of the myriad things that comprise it, what right had he to walk among them?
    But this would get him nowhere. Perhaps, he decided, it was simply a question of context. Perhaps things were just in disarray, not damned each and every one. And if things — not all things, but the limited series of objects in his personal possession — could be arranged in the proper order, like puzzle pieces, or magic words, or the digits of a pass-code, everything might again become itself. And he might rest.
He pays a visit.
    Gabriel lived on the fourth floor of the Redemption Arms Hotel. The sign in the lobby read, “No Guests, No Exceptions,” but they sneaked past the desk when the clerk was in the john. Gabriel’s room was an eight-foot-by-eight-foot square of graffiti-scarred plaster, once painted beige but now various shades of brown and yellow and even blue from the grease from people’s hair, their saliva and other excretions, particles of food. The walls only went up about seven feet, and the remaining space between the sheetrock and the ceiling was filled with a single length of chicken wire, which made it feel as much like a cage as a room. Between the exposed and cobweb-coated beams of the ceiling was a dust-smudged mirrored dome concealing cameras, or at least suggesting the possibility of such concealment. But whether the dome above was empty or filled with watchful electronic eyes did not matter. Everything said and done in every room could be heard in every other. They sat on Gabriel’s bed and listened to muzzled sounds of fucking rise from one room, unmuzzled weeping from another, and somewhere a cheery pop melody leaking thinly from the speaker of a transistor radio.
    Gabriel sipped at a warm quart of Miller High Life. “I wish I could say it was good to see you,”