Ether by Ben Ehrenreich Page A

it would kill us if it could. The notion of a world beyond the fence, of creatures free to move about the world at will, is apparently too much for it.
    The stranger ignores the dog. “You’re not going to answer me?” he asks.
    â€œShould I?”
    â€œYou should.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I asked.” He seems quite sure of this.
    I smile. “Not good enough,” I say. The stranger stares at me, his eyes aflame. I want to laugh, but don’t. Really, I don’t want to be cruel. Or not gratuitously so. The chow keeps snapping at the chainlink. It’s foaming at the mouth. I don’t feel good about this. In fact I feel a little sick.
    â€œAre we wrestling now?” he asks.
    â€œYes,” I try to smile. “We’re wrestling.” The light changes. The sign says WALK. I walk. He’s not beside me anymore. I don’t look back.
    I take the side streets. I return to my worries. They waited for me. I do the math. I leap a puddle at the entrance to an alley and watch two sparrows fight inside an empty bag of cheese puffs. The bag twists and crinkles and jerks as if driven by some invisible conglomeration of gears, or by its own bumbling baggish will. One of the birds expels the other. It emerges dredged in day-glo orange dust, and flies away. For a second, I’m jealous of its flight. Maybe for longer than a second. Then the other sparrow flies away. The wind takes over where the birds left off, lifting the bag in the air.
    I turn a corner and another corner and climb the last block up the hill to my house. Her car is not in the driveway. The house will be empty. I’m hungry, and can’t remember what’s in the fridge. Peanut butter if nothing else. I lift the latch to the low wrought-iron gate and close it again behind me. Of course the stranger’s there already, pacing on my porch, his arms behind his back. He’s not whistling anymore.
    â€œI won’t ask twice,” he says.
    â€œThat’s fine,” I tell him, digging into my pocket for the key.
    A dog trots past on the sidewalk behind me, its nose to the concrete. Its coat is speckled, almost blue. Tail busy, ears alert. If dogs can smile, it’s smiling. A loose-lipped piebald grin. It lifts a leg and dribbles piss on the gardenias. The stranger croaks out something like a laugh. “This time,” he says, “you’re the one behind the fence.”
    â€œLook around,” I say. “Where are you?”
Rush hour.
    The bagman stood on the corner. It was the time of morning known colloquially as rush hour, when the world fades to blur and humankind is granted collective license not to notice its surroundings, to gaze upon creation with the utmost pragmatism, regarding all objects solely as potential obstacles. This is a bad time. Motion is all that matters at this hour, and motion is what occurs, a mass, one-way migration. The endpoint of this pilgrimage, be it office, kitchen or factory floor, is the single image permitted to float before the mind’s eye, odious though that image may be to its bearer. So the bagman, though he formed an island — an archipelago, if you count his three lumped bags — in a veritable sea of pedestrians, was for all intents and purposes, despite his girth, his appearance and his unorthodox scent, invisible.
    He stood and watched the throng surge past. Men in suits bustled officiously by, and men in pressed khakis, and in canvas coveralls. Women in heels and binding skirts of worsted wool clicked past, and some in blue jeans, and in the pink and white uniforms of maids. None slumped. All held their shoulders high and chins forward as if hooked by the collar and pulled workward by a covert network of the slenderest monofilament. The bagman, who had once upon a long-lost time been one of them, watched in awe. How religiously they must regard creation to be able to march so surely through it, and to ignore it so