The Perseids and Other Stories (3 page)

Thursday of that week she came home at noon. Jacob saw her in the window as he was passing on his way to the Settlement House, and that was distressing, because she should have been at the factory. Now, of all times, they couldn’t afford the loss of her pay.

“Cobb sent me home,” Rachel confessed when he hurried inside. She knotted her hands behind her back, and her voice was like ground glass in butter.

“Why? What for?”

She mumbled something about “the roof,” that she had heard “bees on the factory roof.”

“Bees?” Jacob said, feeling sick.

“They start fires,” Rachel said calmly. “They steal women.”

She tried to warn Mr. Cobb but he wouldn’t listen. Jacob could imagine the scene altogether too easily. Of course there were no bees on the steep peaked roof of Cobb’s attic factory. Only Rachel’s demons.

“Cobb fired you?”

Rachel shrugged and nodded.

Jacob turned away from her to hide his fear. He had known this would come. But it had come too soon. He wasn’t ready.

When he fixed dinner that night he put Rachel’s bowl in front of her without bothering to make sure she ate. She said, “You have a hateful face.” And later, “You think you can control me, but you can’t.”

No, he thought, I can’t, but that wouldn’t stop him taking care of her, enduring her insults, cleaning her messes. She was his sister. He owed her a certain loyalty. No matter the cost. No matter how often she cursed him or how much he might resent it.

He woke after midnight, shivering. The door was open and the wind pushed it wider, blowing snow against the hissing stove.

Rachel’s mattress was empty. Jacob pulled on his boots and ran out into the darkness.

He found her a hundred yards down the alley, humming tunelessly and drawing loops and crooked figure-eights in fresh snow with the tip of a broken umbrella. Her fingers were white with the cold. She didn’t resist when he steered her back to the shack. She cursed him, but softly, almost affectionately.

“Fuck you, Jacob.” The snow lay on her dark, wild hair like a crown. “Fuck you. Fuck you.”

The question, Jacob told Ziegler, was not whether she would be happy with Taglieri—he doubted Rachel would ever be happy again in any meaningful way—but whether Taglieri would be willing to take care of her when he understood just how profound Rachel’s madness had become.

“Of course he won’t,” the shopkeeper said. “As you well know.”

Jacob supposed that was true. “But she could clean his floor. As a temporary job, I mean.”

“I suspect your Taglieri won’t settle for that. It’s not what he has in mind.”

“After a day with Rachel, would he still want to take her? I mean,” Jacob blushed, “as a woman?”

“Almost certainly not. So you can accept his five dollars, if that’s what you’re leading up to, and disillusion the poor man. Really, this is none of my business. Let’s play chess.”

Chess was an unforgivable waste of time, but Jacob wanted to enter a trance, wanted the selfish pleasure of being away from himself, even briefly, and he couldn’t do that in the coffeehouses. The deeper Rachel sank into her madness the more Jacob yearned to enter his own private space of mind, as if there were a necessary balance, some equilibrium of sanity.

How to describe the trance to someone who hadn’t experienced it? First there was the willed focus of attention, when the chessboard grew to fill the whole of his vision. Then came the evolution of the game itself, a fluid shape in which chessmen moved almost of their own will, like microbes in a drop of water.

And, finally, an absolute immersion, as deep and embracing as the Nile.

“Did you read ‘The Time Machine,’ Jacob?” Ziegler asked.

Jacob nodded, studying the board.

“Intriguing, isn’t it? The idea of a higher dimension? Like wrapping the chessboard, in a way. It’s a question of perspective, really. Of what the mind is accustomed to.”

Jacob said he supposed so.

“You have the talent for it,” Ziegler said obscurely.

“Your move,” Jacob told him.

And the fugue began. He was distantly aware of Ziegler saying, “One has to admire the bloodlessness of the conquest, given the ruthlessness of the game. A chess piece literally displaces its victim. Such as this pawn of yours. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.”

Then the light changed, and Jacob felt as if he was falling in his chair and the bookstore falling along with him, but it wasn’t frightening at all; it was as natural as falling asleep.

“Only the rare person,” Ziegler said from an incalculable distance, “can rise above the chessboard.”

Jacob didn’t emerge from the trance but seemed to wake up inside it.

Ziegler had gone to the door of the shop, where warm yellow light flooded through window glass no longer etched with frost.

“Come and see,” Ziegler beckoned him.

Jacob stood up, dazed and doubtful, thinking,
The game
—

But the game didn’t matter. This
was
the game.

He went to the door as Ziegler opened it. He thought of the H. G. Wells story “The Door in the Wall,” which had read only yesterday. The story of an elusive, impossible door; a door, Wells had called it, “into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming.”

There was a garden beyond Oscar Ziegler’s door. No, not a garden. A sort of forest. But very strange. A warm, wintergreen-scented
breeze flooded the shop. A box of summery yellow light spilled over the worn floorboards.

Jacob decided this was a dream, if a very strange one, and that he wouldn’t question it, dreams being what they were.

The explanation Ziegler offered him was worse than no explanation at all.

“It’s not a place,” the shopkeeper said, “more like the sum of all places, the heir of all times … the afterlife, if you like.”

“Heaven?” Jacob asked.

“Ah,
Heaven.”
Ziegler smiled, the strange light warm on his ruddy face. “Suppose there
is
a Heaven, Jacob. But imagine a Heaven without a God. Heaven as a natural phenomenon. No reward, no punishment, and no moral order. Only an ecology … what you might call a jungle.”

Jacob stepped out wonderingly into the golden light.

There were no obvious hills in this Heaven; no valleys, unless they were hidden by the forest. A point of vivid light, not quite the familiar sun, stood motionless in an empty blue sky.

Jacob couldn’t see a horizon but he imagined the plain continuing uninterrupted forever, or turning back on itself insensibly, like Ziegler’s imaginary chessboard.

He took another step and saw that the things he had mistaken for trees weren’t trees at all. Like trees, they radiated in branches to terminal clusters of new growth. But the boles were of some substance as smooth and translucent as amber. Yellow amber, Jacob thought, and here and there crimson or emerald green veined with ruby lines. They bore, not leaves, but bunches of conical or rodlike tendrils. So many of these had fallen that the forest floor (if he could call it that) was a mass of decaying crystals, soft mica melting into earth. Things that resembled jeweled scarabs scuttled through the fallen growth.

Each tree, Ziegler told him, was a world, independent and alive, and from another perspective Jacob’s world would look just the same. Ziegler’s voice hummed like a bee in his ear. “There are greater and lesser worlds, Jacob, nested inside one another like Russian dolls. But everything is organic, in the end. Everything
lives, eats, hunts, dies. That’s what the universe
is.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

“You brought yourself. You have that extremely unusual ability. You’re one of the rare ones.”

“Why?”
Jacob repeated, unsure what he meant by the question. His own voice sounded distant and peculiar in the thin air. (Was it air at all? Was he in fact breathing? Was he asleep, dead, drunk on
kif
or absinthe?)

“You were drawn here,” Ziegler said.

There was life in the forest. Above the trees Jacob saw hovering swarms of brightly colored insects. They flashed in the sunlight like massed diamonds. The drone of them was the forest’s only constant sound, now loud, now faint.

Then something moved in the shadow of the crystalline trees very close to him, some object vaporous but purposeful. When it drew nearer he saw that it had a gauzy but human form, and for the first time Jacob was genuinely frightened. He turned back to the door of the bookshop.

The door and its frame—but only the door, and no other part of the building—hovered inches above the ground like an impossible piece of stage dressing.

He stumbled into its enclosed volume of dry heat as Oscar Ziegler took his arm.

Ziegler took his arm, and Jacob woke to the chessboard, the book-lined walls, the crackling of pellet snow against the window.

“Did you see—?” Jacob began, but Ziegler only shrugged and touched his fingers to his lips.

“It’s late, young Jacob,” the shopkeeper said.

The chessboard was in disarray, as if he had fallen across it. Fallen asleep, he supposed. He tried to shake the dream from his mind. He was embarrassed by the vividness of it, embarrassed that he had almost admitted to Ziegler how real it had felt.

For lack of anything sensible to say he asked the shopkeeper, “Did you really play against Anderssen?”

“Anderssen, Morphy, Steinitz, the Man in the Moon. Time to go.”

Jacob was nervous about the door, but when he opened it there was nothing outside more threatening than the wind of a winter night.

“Rachel. Listen to me. Do you want a job?”

His sister had pulled her mattress next to the woodstove. She was wrapped in blankets, all the blankets in the house, it looked like, including Mama’s tattered old Gypsy quilt. “Rachel, are you paying attention?”

The whites of her eyes were clear, the pupils crisp dark nuclei. “Yes.”

“Do you want a new job? Just for a day?”

She frowned. “What job?”

“Wash floors for Taglieri. Clean up, cook him a meal. Just for a day.”

Just for a day.

“That’s all?” Rachel asked.

“That’s all. But you know Taglieri. If he tries to take advantage of you, you come home. If he tries to hurt you, you come home. Do you understand, Rachel?”

She nodded passively.

“Jacob,” she said. “I’m sorry I lost the factory job.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “about—about—” And waved her hand. Everything.

“Do you feel better tonight?”

“I feel all right.”

“Tomorrow we’ll go to Taglieri’s. If you feel well enough, I mean. I’ll go with you.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“That’s right.”

“He has a cat.”

“Yes. Brivio. Try to sleep, Rachel.”

Jacob crept away. He felt flooded with shame.

But if Taglieri touched her the wrong way, Jacob would kill him. The thought helped assuage his guilt. He lay in bed, hoping he could make Taglieri understand the terms of the bargain.

His mind was racing and he couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes he thought of the overdue rent, or Rachel and the Italian, or the crystalline forest beyond Oscar Ziegler’s door.

Better to think of chess. He played chess in his mind, working out an opening Ziegler had showed him, but he couldn’t stop thinking of the “wrapped” board and the subtle grammar of its topology, of “The Time Machine” and “The Door in the Wall,” of what a chess game might look like as a four-dimensional object. He spiraled at last down these odd alleys into sleep.

The indistinct shape moving in the refracted shade of the trees came closer to him.
(You were drawn here
, Ziegler had said.)

Bolder now that he was here alone, Jacob let the thing approach him. From a distance it had looked as insubstantial as a winter breath. Closer, it took on a hazy substance, a human form.

It looked like Rachel.

Its face was like Rachel’s—a reflection of Rachel in a mirror of fog—but smooth, young, not at all careworn. The apparition was naked but moved with the simple shamelessness of a child. Jacob felt the creature’s gentle interest in him. He smiled, and the sister-thing returned his smile. It moved its mouth as if to speak, but Jacob heard no sound. He let the apparition walk around him, inspecting him, and the impression he took from its motion was a mixture of uneasiness and great patience.

The buzzing of the faraway insects surrounded him like a child’s gentle murmur. Jacob felt no ill will from the ghost and he let it linger. He thought of Rachel as she had been before her madness—as spritely as this shadow of her.

The memory comforted him even when the dream faded and he woke.

The Italian counted out five dollars as Rachel stood with her head bowed in the shadows outside Taglieri’s cheap room.

“You don’t touch her,” Jacob whispered into Taglieri’s gnarled ear. “Do you understand?”

“Of course,” Taglieri said. “I’m not an animal.” He put his huge hands on Rachel’s shoulders. She flinched away. Taglieri held on. “Come in, Rachel. Let me look at you.”

Oscar Ziegler beamed with pleasure as Jacob entered the store. He reached for the chessboard, but Jacob said, “No. First we talk.”