The Perseids and Other Stories (25 page)

But the books were gone.

I had traded them, in effect, for
You Will Never Die.

Which I had returned to Oscar Ziegler.

Cup your hands as you might. The water runs through your fingers.

There was only the most rudimentary service at the crematorium where Ziegler’s body was burned. A few words from an Episcopal minister Deirdre had hired for the occasion, an earnest young man in clerical gear and neatly pressed Levis who pronounced his consolations and hurried away as if late for another function. Deirdre said, afterward, “I don’t know if I’ve been given a gift or an obligation. For a man who never left his room, Mr. Ziegler had a way of weaving people into his life.” She shook her head sadly. “If any of it really matters. I mean, if we’re not devoured by aliens or God knows what. You can’t turn on the news these days.… Well, I guess he bailed out just in time.”

Or moved on. Moved someplace where his emphysema was curable, his failing heart reparable, his aging cells regenerable.

Shunting the train Oscar Ziegler along a more promising if less plausible track.…

“The evidence,” I said suddenly.

“What?”

“The books I told you about.”

“Oh. Right. Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t get a good look at them.” She frowned. “Is
that
what you’re thinking? Oh, shit, that fucking Soziere book of his! It’s
bait
, Mr. Keller, don’t you get it? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he loved to suck people into whatever cloistered little mental universe he inhabited, misery loves company, and that book was always the bait—”

“No,” I said, excited despite my best intentions, as if Ziegler’s cremation had been a message, his personal message to me, that the universe discarded bodies like used Kleenex but that consciousness was continuous, seamless, immortal.… “I mean about the evidence. You didn’t see it—but someone did.”

“Leave it alone. You don’t understand about Ziegler. Oscar Ziegler was a sour, poisonous old man. Maybe older than he looked. That’s what I thought of when I read Soziere’s book: Oscar Ziegler, someone so ridiculously old that he wakes up every morning surprised he’s still a human being.” She stared fiercely at me. “What exactly are you contemplating here—serial suicide?”

“Nothing so drastic.”

I thanked her and left.

The paradox of proof.

I went to Niemand’s store as soon as I left Deirdre.

I had shown the books to Niemand, the book dealer. He was the impossible witness, the corroborative testimony. If Niemand had seen the books, then I was sane; if Niemand had seen the books they might well turn up among Ziegler’s possessions, and I could establish their true provenance and put all this dangerous Soziere mythology behind me.

But Niemand’s little second-story loft store had closed. The sign was gone. The door was locked and the space was for lease.

Neither the jeweler downstairs nor the coffee-shop girl next
door remembered the store, its clientele, or Niemand himself.

There was no Niemand in the phone book. Nor could I find his commercial listing. Not even in my yellow pages at home, where I had first looked it up.

Or remembered looking it up.

Anomalous experience.

Which constituted proof, of a kind, though Ziegler was right; it was not transferable. I could convince no one, ultimately, save myself.

The television news was full of apocalypse that night. A rumor had swept the Internet that the great gamma-ray burst was imminent, only days away. No, it was not, scientists insisted, but they allowed themselves to be drawn by their CNN inquisitors into hypothetical questions. Would there be any safe place? A half-mile underground, say, or two, or three?
(Probably not
, they admitted; or,
We don’t have the full story yet.)

To a man, or woman, they looked unsettled and skittish.

I went to bed knowing she was out there, Lorraine, I mean, out among the plenitude of worlds and stars. Alone, perhaps, since I must have died to her—infinities apart, certainly, but enclosed within the same inconceivably vast multiuniverse, as alike, in our way, as two snowflakes in an avalanche.

I slept with the pill bottle cradled in my hand.

The trick, I decided, was to abandon the charade, to
mean
the act.

In other words, to swallow twenty or thirty tablets—a more difficult act than you might imagine—and wash them down with a neat last shot of Glenlivet.

But Deirdre called.

Almost too late.

Not late enough.

I picked up the phone, confused, my hands butting the receiver like antagonistic parade balloons. I said, or meant to say, “Lorraine?”

But it was Deirdre, only Deirdre, and before long Deirdre was shouting in an annoying way. I let the phone drop. I suppose she called 911.

I woke in a hospital bed.

I lay there passively for more than an hour, by the digital clock on the bedstand, cresting waves of sleep and wondering at the silence, until I was visited by Candice.

Her name was written on her lapel tag. Candice was a nurse, with a throaty Jamaican accent and wide, sad eyes.

“You’re awake,” she said, barely glancing at me.

My head hurt. My mouth tasted of ashes and quicklime. I needed to pee, but there was a catheter in the way.

“I think I want to see a doctor,” I managed.

“Prob’ly you do,” Candice agreed. “And prob’ly you should. But our last resident went home yesterday. I can take the catheter out, if that’s what you want.”

“There are no doctors?”

“Home with their families like everybody else.” She fluffed my pillow. “Only us pathetic lonelyhearts left, Mr. Keller. You been unconscious ten days.”

Later she wheeled me down the corridor—though I insisted I could have walked—to a lounge with a tall plateglass window, where the ward’s remaining patients had gathered to talk and weep and watch the fires that burned fitfully through the downtown core.

Soziere’s curse. We become—or we make ourselves—less “likely.” But it’s not our own unlikeliness we perceive; instead, we see the world growing strange around us.

The lights are out all over the city. The hospital, fortunately, has its own generator. I tried to call Deirdre from a hospital phone, but there was no dial tone, just a crackling hiss, like the last groove in an LP record.

The previous week’s newspapers, stacked by the door of the hospital lounge, were dwindling broadsheets containing nothing but stark outlines of the impending gamma-ray disaster.

The extraterrestrial warning had been timely. Timely, though we read it far too late. Apparently it not only identified the threatening binary neutron stars—which were spiraling at last into gaudy destruction, about to emit a burst of radiation brighter than a billion galaxies—but provided a calculable time scale.

A countdown, in other words, which had already closed in on its ultimate zero. Too close to home, a black hole was about to be born.

None of us would survive that last flash of annihilating fire.

Or, at least, if we did, we would all become extremely unlikely.

I remember a spot of blue luminescence roughly the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length, suspended above the burning city: Cherenkov radiation. Gamma rays fractured molecules in the upper atmosphere, loading the air with nitric oxides the color of dry blood. The sky was frying like a bad picture tube.

The hard, ionizing radiation would arrive within hours. Cosmic rays striking the wounded atmosphere would trigger particle cascades, washing the crust of the Earth with what the papers called “high-energy muons.”

I was tired of the ward lounge, the incessant weeping and periodic shouting.

Candice took me aside. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “what I told the others. I been into the medicine cupboard. If you don’t want to wait, there are pills you can take.”

The air smelled suddenly of burning plastic. Static electricity drew bright blue sparks from metal shelves and gurney carts. Surely this would be the end: the irrevocable death, the utter annihilation, if there can ever be an end.

I told Candice a nightcap might be a good idea, and she smiled wanly and brought me the pills.

They want me to keep on with my memoirs.

They take the pages away from me, exchange them for greater rations of food.

The food is pale, chalky, with the claylike texture of goat cheese. They excrete it from a sort of spinerette, white obscene lumps of it, like turds.

I prefer to think of them as advanced machines rather than biological entities—vending machines, say, not the eight-foot-long centipedes they appear to be.

They’ve mastered the English language. (I don’t know how.) They say “please” and “thank you.” Their voices are thin and reedy, a sound like tree branches creaking on a windy winter night.

They tell me I’ve been dead for ten thousand years.

Today they let me out of my bubble, let me walk outside, with a sort of mirrored umbrella to protect me from the undiluted sunlight.

The sunlight is intense, the air cold and thin. They have explained, in patient but barely intelligible whispers, that the gamma ray burst and subsequent bath of cosmic radiation stripped the earth of its ozone layer as well as much of the upper atmosphere. The oxygen that remains, they say, is “fossil” oxygen, no longer replenished. The soil is alive with radioactive nuclei: samarium 146, iodine 129, isotopes of lead, of plutonium.

There is no macroscopic life on Earth. Present company excepted.

Everything died. People, plants, plankton, everything but the bacteria inhabiting the rocks of the deep mantle or the scalding water around undersea volcanic vents. The surface of the planet—here, at least—has been scoured by wind and radiation into a rocky desert.

All this happened ten thousand years ago. The sun shines placidly on the lifeless soil, the distant blue-black mountains.

Everything I loved is dead.

I can’t imagine the technology they used to resurrect me, to recreate me, as they insist, from desiccated fragments of biological tissue tweezed from rocks. It’s not just my DNA they have recovered but (apparently, somehow) my memories, my self, my consciousness.

I suppose Carl Soziere wouldn’t be surprised.

I ask about others, other survivors reclaimed from the waterless desert. My captors (or saviors) only spindle their sickeningly mobile bodies: a gesture of negation, I’ve come to understand, the equivalent of a shake of the head. There are no other survivors.

And yet I can’t help wondering whether Lorraine waits to be salvaged from her grave—some holographic scrap of her, at least; information scattered by time, like the dust of an ancient book.

There is nothing in my transparent cell but bowls of water and food, a floor soft enough to serve as a mattress, and the blunted writing instruments and clothlike paper. (Are they afraid I might commit suicide?)

The memoirs run out. I want the extra food, and I enjoy the diversion of writing, but what remains to be said? And to whom?

Lately I’ve learned to distinguish between my captors.

The “leader” (that is, the individual most likely to address me directly and see that others attend to my needs) is a duller shade of silver-white, his cartilaginous shell dusted with fine powder. He (or she) possesses many orifices, all visible when he sways back to speak. I have identified his speaking orifice and his food-excreting orifice, but there are three others I haven’t seen in use, including a tooth-lined maw that must be a kind of mouth.

“We are the ones who warned you,” he tells me. “For half of a million years we warned you. If you had known, you might have protected yourself.” His grammar is impeccable, to my ears anyway, although consonants in close proximity make him stumble and hiss. “You might have deconstructed your moon, created
a shield, as we did. Numerous strategies might have succeeded in preserving your world.”

The tocsin had sounded, in other words, for centuries. We had simply been too dull to interpret it, until the very end, when nothing could be done to counter the threat.

I try not to interpret this as a rebuke.

“Now we have learned to transsect distance,” the insectile creature explains. “Then, we could only signal.”