The Perseids and Other Stories (26 page)

I ask whether he could re-create the Earth, revive the dead.

“No,” he says. Perhaps the angle of his body signifies regret. “One of you is puzzle enough.”

They live apart from me, in an immense silver half-sphere embedded in the alkaline soil. Their spaceship?

For a day they haven’t come. I sit alone in my own much smaller shelter, its bubble walls polarized to filter the light but transparent enough to show the horizon with vicious clarity. I feel abandoned, a fly on a vast pane of dusty glass. And hungry. And thirsty.

They return—apologetically—with water, with paper and writing implements, and with a generous supply of food, thoughtfully pre-excreted.

They are compiling, they tell me, a sort of interstellar database, combining the functions of library, archeological museum, and telephone exchange. They are most grateful for my writings, which have been enthusiastically received. “Your cosmology,” by which they must mean Soziere’s cosmology, “is quite distinctive.”

I thank them but explain that there is nothing more to write—and no audience I can even begin to imagine.

The news perplexes them. The leader asks, “Do you need a human audience?”

Yes. Yes, that’s what I need. A human audience. Lorraine, warning me away from despair, or even Deirdre, trying vainly to shield me from black magic.

They confer for another day.

I walk outside my bubble at sunset, alone, with my silver umbrella
tilted toward the western horizon. When the stars appear, they are astonishingly bright and crisp. I can see the frosted breath of the Milky Way.

“We cannot create a human audience for you,” the leader says, swaying in a chill noon breeze like a stately elm. “But there is perhaps a way.”

I wait. I am infinitely patient.

“We have experimented with time,” the creature announces. Or I think the word is “experimented.” It might as easily have been the clacking buzz of a cricket or a cicada.

“Send me back,” I demand at once.

“No, not you, not physical objects. It cannot be done. Thoughts, perhaps. Dreams. Speaking to minds long dead. Of course, it changes nothing.”

I rather like the idea, when they explain it, of my memoirs circulating through the Terrestrial past, appearing fragmented and unintelligible among the night terrors of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Roman slaves, Chinese peasants, science fiction writers, drunken poets. And Deirdre Frank, and Oscar Ziegler. And Lorraine.

Even the faintest touch—belated, impossible—is better than none at all.

But still. I find it difficult to write.

“In that case,” the leader says, “we would like to salvage you.”

“Salvage me?”

They consult in their own woody, windy language, punctuated by long silences or sounds I cannot hear.

“Preserve you,” they conclude. “Yourself. Your soul.”

And how would they do that?

“I would take you into my body,” the leader says.

Eat me, in other words. They have explained this more than once. Devour my body, hoc est corpus, and spit out my soul like a cherry pit into the great galactic telephone exchange.

“But this is how we must do it,” the leader says apologetically.

I don’t fear them.

I take a long last walk, at night, bundled against the cold in layers of flexible foil. The stars have not changed visibly in the ten thousand years of my absence, but there is nothing else familiar, no recognizable landmarks, I gather, anywhere on the surface of the planet. This might be an empty lake bed, this desert of mine, saline and ancient and, save for the distant mountains, flat as a chessboard.

I don’t fear them. They might be lying, I know, although I doubt it; surely not even the most alien of creatures would travel hundreds of light years to a dead planet in search of a single exotic snack.

I do fear their teeth, however, sharp as shark’s teeth, even if (as they claim) their bodies secrete an anesthetic and euphoriant venom.

And death?

I don’t fear death.

I dread the absence of it.

Maybe Soziere was wrong. Maybe there’s a teleological escape clause, maybe all the frayed threads of time will be woven back together at the end of the world, assembled in the ultimate library, where all the books and all the dreams are preserved and ordered in their multiple infinities.

Or not.

I think, at last, of Lorraine: really think of her, I mean; imagine her next to me, whispering that I ought to have taken her advice, not lodged this grief so close to my heart; whispering that death is not a door through which I can follow her, no matter how hard or how often I try.…

“Will you accept me?” the leader asks, rearing up to show his needled mouth, his venom sacs oozing a pleasant narcotic.

“I’ve accepted worse,” I tell him.

The first cramp hit her just ten minutes before Nick Lavin was due to arrive with his daughter Persey. Deirdre ignored it. She didn’t want to be sick right now. She hadn’t seen Nick for more than five years and she wanted to make a good impression. So she hung stoically over the rusty basin of the bathroom sink, wondering whether she would vomit, while her belly knotted in long, dry peristaltic waves.

She hated this bathroom. It might have been quaint, with its clawfoot tub and porcelain water closet and peeling Victorian wallpaper. It wasn’t. It was dark, it was narrow, and it reeked of genteel poverty. Like so many of the furnishings of her life, it was not something she had chosen; it was something she had arrived at.

But the pain diminished at last. Funny how familiar pain was when you were suffering, how distant it seemed afterward. Pain was like some little animal that lived in a burrow in your stomach and came out every now and then to take the air. The cold sweat dried and she washed her face with a washcloth. The pain had left no visible evidence. She looked at herself in the mirror. Pushing sixty, Deirdre thought. How had
that
happened? And how old would Nick be these days—forty-eight, forty-nine? With a teenage daughter. Persephone. Only Nick would name a child Persephone. On the phone he had called her “Persey.”

Deirdre’s hair was gray but long and full. She wore faded blue-jeans and a batiked blouse from the Goodwill. The heavy lenses
of her eyeglasses had slipped down her small nose again. She bumped them back up with her thumb.

She hid in an upstairs bedroom and rolled a joint to take away the lingering residue of discomfort. This was the resinous cannabis she had grown in the subcellar, potent but strange-tasting, dark as peat moss. It expanded into her lungs like a hot balloon and left behind its peculiar halo of strangeness and ease. She remembered reading somewhere that the ancient Scythians had smoked pot. Burned the seed clusters inside a communal hut. A sweat lodge for stoners. Had she done that herself, in some former life?

Far away, there was a woodpecker sound. Nick and Persey at the door. Oh, God. She hid her soapstone pipe in a drawer and hurried down the stairs to let them in. A residue of pain beat in her abdomen like a hummingbird’s wings.

She led them through the dim warren of the bookstore, through the bead curtains and up to the kitchen. Nick and Persey sat at the Ikea table while Deirdre put the kettle on for tea. “Interesting digs,” Nick said, which she supposed was his attempt to be tactful. Tact had never been Nick’s long suit.

He sat there smiling at her, looking like any other middle-aged man. The years had erased his individuality. Back in the commune days he had dressed like a hirsute backwoodsman, his full beard framing his face, his smile quick and generous. Plaid timberjack jackets, long blond hair, dirty fingernails. Now he looked like every other millennium prole. Without the casement of his beard his lips were too full, his chin too small. He had shaved his head to disguise, or acknowledge, his hair loss. He wore a tiny gold ring in the lobe of one ear. He taught undergraduate English literature and had just landed a position at the University of Toronto, back from his decades-long exile at some women’s college or other in the American hinterland.

“I inherited the bookstore,” Deirdre said. “The old man who owned it had no family. I was his only employee. He willed the property to me. Much to my astonishment. One of these days I’ll put it up for sale. Been planning to. But it brings in a little bit of
profit most months. It’s not labor-intensive and it’s, you know, a place to live.”

She had fixed up the upstairs living quarters, had sold or given away Oscar Ziegler’s cloying Mauve Decade furniture and replaced it with generic but modern equivalents. She had meant to paint the walls and carpet the creaking wooden floors… she just hadn’t gotten around to it.

“It’s really interesting,” Persey observed, “in a fucked-up way.”

She didn’t mean anything by it, but Deirdre was faintly shocked to hear her use the f-word in front of adults. Not that Deirdre herself was particularly dainty about it. Fuck, no. But Persephone was a good-looking and well-scrubbed fifteen-year-old, the sort people called “wholesome.” Times change, Deirdre supposed; most of the young people she met these days couldn’t order breakfast or make change without using the f-word.

Nick gave his daughter a sharp look, but Deirdre said, “It
is
fucked up. It’s an old building and you can bet it’s not up to municipal code. The plumbing is ridiculous and I had to put new wiring in the basement just to run the washer and dryer.” Not to mention the thousand-watt metal-halide grow-light in the sub-cellar.

“Lots to read, though,” Persey said, hastening to repair the faux pas. “It must be great living over a secondhand bookstore.”

“Persey’s a bookworm,” Nick said.

“What do you like to read, Persey?”

“All kinds of things.” The last book she had read, Persey said, was
I Know This Much Is True
, by Wally Lamb. Pretty ambitious for a teenager, Deirdre thought.

Nick said, “She likes Oprah books.”

“Not just,” Persey said, blushing.

“If you want to,” Deirdre told her, “you can go downstairs, switch on the lights and look at the books. Pick out something you want. On the house.”

“To keep?” Persey asked hopefully.

“To keep.”

“Don’t get anything out of order,” Nick said as his daughter made for the stairs, her tear-away pants brushing the kitchen
door, her ridiculous disco heels knocking the floorboards.

Deirdre poured tea for herself and Nick. She sat across the table from him trying to smile but wanting, obscurely, to cry. Was it just because this meeting with Nick had made her feel so fucking old? So old, now, that there was no disguising it? In the commune days—the days when five unmarried young persons sharing a downtown apartment could pronounce themselves a “commune,” as if the French Revolution had broken out—Nick had been twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five; Deirdre had been nine years older. Even then, they had occasionally called her “Earth Mother,” and it wasn’t always a compliment. On the other hand, because everybody was sleeping with everybody else, no one wanted to push the maternal metaphor too far.

Yes, she had slept with Nick. It had been quite passionate for a few months. Now, by some silent mutual agreement, neither of them would mention it.

“She seems real nice,” Deirdre said, meaning Persey.

“A little outspoken,” Nick said, “at least since her mom remarried. She spends a month out of every year with Patrice and Joseph in Ann Arbor, getting spoiled rotten.”

“No, she seems great. And literate, which is kind of a rarity.”

“I found her reading a Tom Clancy novel last week. I thought, where have I failed?”

“Bullshit. You’re proud of her.”

“From time to time.”

“You should be.”

And they talked about Patrice and Annie and Carl and the rest of that crowd, how they were doing and where they were, until they had exhausted the shortlist of mutual acquaintances and there was nothing left to say. Deirdre began to feel weirdly superior to Nick, as if in her poverty she had retained some authenticity he had lost. Still, that made him one of the last of the good ones, broad-minded enough to be bashful about his own success. Nowadays, when you outperformed an old friend, you were supposed to make a notch in your gunstock or some damn thing.

A slice of summer moonlight found its way into the alley behind
the shop, her kitchen window. Persey remained downstairs, rummaging and reading. Deirdre felt mischievous. “So,” she said, “you want to share a joint?”

Nick grinned—a ghost of the old Nick inhabiting his face. “Still smoking, Deirdre?”

“Off and on. You?”

“Not for years. But it’s only a joint, right? What the hell.”

She had rolled one for herself last night and left it in a kitchen drawer. She took it out. “The kids Persey’s age,” she said, “it’s all, what, Ecstasy? GHB?”

“All I know is what I read in the papers. Lots of drugs, but it sounds like frat-party shit to me. Nothing profound about it.”

“Whereas
we
….” Deirdre teased.

“We were on a
spiritual quest.”

They both laughed. But the irony wasn’t lost on Deirdre. She was laughing at herself. Nick, like most people of her class and generation, had put away the Tibetan Book of the Dead, donated
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
to the yard sale, filled the empty shelf space with Windows guidebooks and
Listening to Prozac.
Only Deirdre had gone on questing after the fabled enlightenment… but no, not that, not the usual discount guru bullshit; something else; something strange, elusive, unworldly.