Ether by Ben Ehrenreich Page B

completely.
    The bagman slumped. He scratched himself. He belched and belched again, loudly. No one looked his way. On the opposite corner, across a clogged river of howling, honking cars, one figure stood out. One man stood still, a tall and almost skeletally thin man wearing thick eyeglasses over clear, blue eyes of an almost shocking innocence. He had a long, pale face that looked like it had been carved with dull tools from a tree trunk. His hair was red and curly and unevenly styled, as if he had attempted to paste it flat against his skull with gel, but had lost interest halfway through. Around his neck hung a choker of black-rimmed camera lenses strung with kitchen twine. Beneath that a loosely knotted tie. He wore a sandwich-board over his clothes and held a megaphone before his lips. He appeared to be preaching. Don’t confuse him with the man I heard preaching through my window. This was a different sort of preacher. He did not mention love at all. Or even sin.
    From across the avenue, the bagman could not hear a word he said, and could not make out the text printed on his board. The sun glinted off the lenses around the preacher’s neck, blinding the bagman. Intrigued, he shouldered his bags and when the light changed, he joined the rushing masses and crossed the street.
    The bagman sat on the gum-stained concrete at the base of a lamppost and leaned against his bags. Above him hummed a camera. Knees, ankles, hemlines hurried by. The tall man with the megaphone stood a few paces away, curiously motionless. Between the legs of the passing workers, the bagman struggled to read the front of the preacher’s signboard. Written there, in green magic marker, were these words:
    Why do you sleep, O Lord?
    Why do you hide your face?
    The preacher looked lost. He let the megaphone dangle at his thigh. His jaw hung slack. Pedestrians bumped him from all sides. He teetered, and fought to keep his balance. His chin twitched. One eye twitched, then his nose, and his cheekbones one by one. Each lip twitched, and each temple, each twitch a required step in a sequence of preparatory impulses necessary before some crucial internal circuit could be breached. Then a wave of determination overtook him. He placed himself squarely in the path of one man, and then another. They pushed him casually aside as if bending back a branch that hung too low over the trail in front of them. Undiscouraged, he held the megaphone to his mouth. A peal of feedback screeched from it. The crowd flinched, like fish do when a shadow passes over the surface of their pond. The man bent his lips into words, but no sound came forth. At last he stuttered, “H-h-h-h-h-h-h-how, h-h-how long?” He gazed deliberately around him as if expecting an answer to his query, but no one save the bagman and the cameras mounted high on the lampposts so much as glanced his way.
    The preacher let the megaphone drop to his side. A strand of red hair unglued itself from his scalp and dangled over the earpiece of his glasses. His body slackened, as if some vital quality had been emptied from him. He let himself be jostled, and almost fell. Then once again, twitching overcame his features and he was suddenly renewed. He set his feet firmly apart. He squared his shoulders and filled his lungs with air. The lenses around his neck clattered into place. With booming conviction and without a moment’s stutter, he declared, “He walks among us!” But he forgot to use the megaphone. The clatter of heels on the pavement and the screeching of the traffic swallowed his voice entirely. He remembered the thing in his fist and lifted it again to his lips. It was too late. All he could get out was another stammered “H-h-h-h-he . . .” before his enthusiasm again abandoned him.
    The bagman sat among his bags like a giant, begrimed ceramic Buddha. He watched the stuttering preacher with great and growing interest. The crowds around them at last began to thin.