The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Ziegler set up the chessboard while Jacob confessed his problems with Rachel. He had confided in Ziegler before. Ziegler always listened patiently.

  Jacob said, “I wish I could believe she was getting better. There are times when she’s almost normal. Other times….”

  “She’s not getting better,” Ziegler said flatly. “She has a disease. In fifty years they’ll call it ‘schizophrenia’ and admit that it’s incurable. In a hundred—”

  “How do you know that?”

  He waved away the question. “Don’t count on Rachel getting better, is what I’m saying.”

  “I can’t support her by myself. Even if I could, I can’t be with her all the time. If she gets worse she might hurt herself. I don’t know how to protect her.”

  “You can’t.”

  “She’s my sister. She doesn’t have anyone else.”

  Ziegler balanced the white queen in his hand, walking it between his fingers like a stage magician with a coin. “There are asylums. Or even this man, what’s his name, Tarantula—”

  “Taglieri. To be honest, I thought about it. A warm house and decent food, who knows? Maybe it would help her. But taking money for my sister….” He didn’t have words to express the vileness of it. And how could it matter if Rachel was warm and well-dressed, when the price was Taglieri forcing himself between her legs every night?

  But didn’t every married woman face the same troublesome bargain?

  Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?”

  “Of course.”

  “God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.”

  Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate.

  Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?”

  “Faith.”

  “Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was fealty. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality contingent. Don’t go around killing innocent people that is, unless you’re absolutely certain God wants you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo.

  “Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ‘No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.”

  “What does this have to do with Rachel”

  “My point,” Ziegler said, “is that sacrifice is a complicated business. If you give Rachel to this Taglieri, are you harming her or helping her How can you be sure? And if you don’t give her up—if you spend the rest of your enviable youth and all of your innate kindness protecting her from her own lunacy—have you put yourself on the altar”

  Jacob was startled. “There must be another choice.”

  Ziegler held out two clenched fists. Two hidden pawns. He smiled. “Choose.”

  As the game progressed Ziegler said, “I have to tell you something, Jacob. You’re the best chess novice I’ve come across. Not terribly experienced and not subtle at all. But the way you think chess is genuinely remarkable.”

  “You play very well yourself.”

  “Thank you. I played Anderssen once, when he was a child.”

  “Adolph Anderssen, the German master? My father talked about him.” Jacob frowned. “But Anderssen was an old man half a century ago.”

  Ziegler shrugged. “Some other Anderssen, then.” The shopkeeper attempted an exchange of queens, which Jacob declined. The end was inevitable now. For once, Ziegler capitulated before the actual checkmate. He tapped his king with a thumbnail and sent it teetering against an impotent rook. Then he sat back in his chair and wrapped his hands over his belly. “You know, Jacob, there’s another way to play this game.”

  “Another way to play chess?”

  “A revision of the rules.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Stay. Please. This won’t take long.”

  The coal furnace roared and the bookshop’s floorboards moaned with the heat. Jacob let himself be convinced to spend a little more time in the warmth. The game Ziegler proposed was something he called lateral chess: this involved an assumption that the chessboard was (in Ziegler’s own strange words) “topographically looped”—that is, the final squares at the left edge of the board were connected immaterially to the first squares at the right. The rook, for instance, could take a pawn on the rank even with another piece interposed, simply by coming at it from the opposite direction.

  Once Jacob grasped the idea, he enjoyed working out the possibilities. In effect, the new rule took away the center of the board. A conventionally dominant position looked suddenly very different: a knight or a bishop could dominate from the rim. Castling became moot.

  And this time, Ziegler won the game. Jacob wanted to play again.

  “If you like,” Ziegler said mildly.

  Jacob failed to take note of the dusky winter sky beyond the window. He had always enjoyed his chess trances but he found this kind of chess even more enthralling, if only for its novelty. He longed to abandon himself to it, one more time, one more game, win or lose…. “Good,” Ziegler said approvingly as he set up the pieces once more, “but this time we wrap the board in both directions—rank and file, fore and aft. If one of my pieces reaches your first rank, it can keep going.”

  In effect, the looped board had become a sphere, a sphere represented on a plane, like a Mercator projection of the Earth. It would have meant instantaneous mutual checkmate if Ziegler had not added a set of first-pass rules. The consequences were subtle, at least until the endgame when the ranks had been thinned; then Ziegler took him with a knight fork Jacob had completely overlooked.

  Spherical chess! He longed to play again.

  But this time Ziegler wouldn’t. “Look at the window, Jacob. The moon is up. You can feel the cold through the walls. Go home. Come see me again next week.”

  There was no new book this time. But that was all right. Spherical chess was a better gift. Anyway, Jacob hadn’t finished The Time Machine and Other Stories.

  Rachel had been alone for hours. She stared at him accusingly when he came through the door. She had let the fire in the stove die away to nothing. The shack was brutally cold. The water in the wash pots had grown brittle lids of ice.

  3.

  The February rent was due, and Jacob worked hard to make up the inevitable shortfall. He taught English to the Goldbergs, the Walersteins, the dimwitted Vincenzo sisters. He crept into Greek and Macedonian coffeehouses to accept bets on his chess prowess. He was punched once by a humiliated Galician dairy worker but escaped before he could be robbed. He developed a hole in his shoe.

  Rachel had passed deeply into the orbit of her madness this winter. She was hostile and withdrawn, hardly eating, and Jacob had to remind himself of what she had been when they were younger: Rachel at the Brant Street School, her hair in red ribbons. For all her moodiness, she had seemed golden in those days. She would take Jacob on long walks to the docklands or to the fancy English shops. They had shared stories with each other. Rachel had been a great reader of fairy tales. She had read to him from Struwelpeiter, her favorite book.

  In those days it had been possible to eke some kindness out of Rachel, before she closed herself to the world. He couldn’t remember the last time she had said a kind word to him, though she sometimes admitted being frightened.

  Was she dying? People don’t always die all at once, Ziegler had
told him. Sometimes they die a little at a time. That makes it hard.

  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.

  4.

  “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?”