The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  God help me, I hung up the phone.

  THE INNER INNER CITY

  “Invent a religion,” John Carver said, and for the first time I really took notice of him.

  It wasn’t the invitation. All of us in the group had been asked to do stranger things. It was the way he said it. I had pegged Carver as one of those affluent post-grads perfectly content to while away a decade in a focusless quest for a Ph.D., one of the krill of the academic ocean. He would float until he was swallowed … by the final onus of a degree, by an ambitious woman, by his own aimlessness. In the meantime he was charming enough company.

  But he posed his challenge with an insouciance and an air of mischief that took me by surprise. He perched on the arm of the leather recliner and looked straight at me, though there were fifteen of us crowded into the living room. He wore casually expensive clothes, tailored jeans and a pastel sweatshirt, the sort of items whose brand names I felt I was expected to recognize, though I never did. His face was lean and handsome. Not blandly handsome—aggressively handsome. He looked, not like a rapist, but like the sort of actor who would be cast as one in an afternoon drama.

  Deirdre Frank peered at him through the multiplying lenses of her enormous eyeglasses. “What kind of religion? Any kind of religion?”

  “A new religious doctrine,” Carver said, “or dogma, article of faith, heresy, occultism, cosmology. Original in its elements. Submissions marked on a ten-point sliding scale, we all mark each other, and in the event of a tie I cast the deciding vote.” All this was as usual. “Are we game?”

  Someone had to go first. In this case it was Michelle, my wife. She opened the carved-basswood jewelery box we kept for the occasion and slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside. “I’m in,” she said. “But it’s a toughie, John.”

  In the end we all anted up, even Chuck Byrnie, the tweedy atheist from the U. of T. chemistry department, though he grumbled before committing himself. “Somewhat unfair. More in Deirdre’s line than mine.”

  Most of us were faculty. Deirdre was our chief exception. She had no credentials but an arts degree, class of ’68, and a long perambulation through Toronto’s evolving fringe cultures: Yorkville, Rochdale, Harbord Street, Queen Street. She owned the Golden Bough Gem and Crystal Shoppe, where Michelle worked part-time. She was perhaps the paradigm of the aging hippie, gray-tressed and overweight, usually draped in a batiqued caftan or some other wildly inappropriate ethnic garb. But she wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t afraid to match egos with the rest of us. “Stop whining, Chuck. Even the physicists are mystics nowadays.”

  “You’ve read Mary Baker Eddy. You have an advantage.”

  “Oh? And where would you guys be without Roger Bacon? Admit it—all you science types are closet alchemists.”

  Fifteen hundred dollars in the kitty. Michelle locked the box in our safe, where it waited for a winner. Gatherings were held weekly, but the contest was quarterly. We had three months to play Christ, Buddha, Zoroaster. Winner take all.

  The challenge sparked an evening’s conversation, which was the purpose of it. What was religion, exactly, and where did you start? A new paganism or a new Christian heresy? Did UFOs count? ESP?

  From these seeds would spring our ideas, and after tonight we wouldn’t mention the subject again until the results were presented in November. It was our fifth year. The contest had started with a friendly wager between Michelle and a self-styled performance artist named Heather, something about whether Whitman was a better poet than Emerson. I had ended up refereeing the debate. Our Friday night social circle rendered final judgment, and we all enjoyed it so much (except Heather, who vanished soon thereafter) that we made it an institution, with rules: a Challenge, a Challenger, a hundred-dollar ante, judgment by tribunal. Challenges had ranged from the whimsical (rewrite your favorite fairy tale in the style of William Faulkner) to the grinding (explain the theory of relativity using words of one syllable, points for clarity and brevity). Our best pots had topped two thousand dollars.

  Carver’s challenge was … interesting, and I wondered what had prompted it. To my knowledge he had never shown much interest in religion or the occult. I remembered him from my course on the Romantics, blithely amused but hardly fascinated. Something Byronesque about him, I thought, but without the doomed intensity; say, Byron on Zoloft. Tonight he was animated and engaging, and I wondered what else I had missed about him.

  Sometime past midnight I stepped out onto the balcony for a breath of air. We had lived in this apartment for ten years, Michelle and I. Central but a little north, seventeen stories up, southern exposure. The city scrolled away from us like a vast and intricate diagram, as indecipherable as the language of the Hittites. Lights dim as stars cut into the black vastness of Lake Ontario, all quivering in the rising remains of the heat of the day. Here was a religion, I thought. Here was my religion. My secret book, my Talmud.

  I had known this about myself for a long time, my addiction to the obscure beauty of the city. For most of my life I had consoled myself in its contradictions, its austerities and its baroque recomplications. Here was the short answer to Carver’s challenge. I would make a city religion. An urban occultism. Divination by cartography. Call it paracartography.

  Carver came through the sliding door as if I had summoned him. His presence broke the mood, but I was excited enough to describe my notion to him. He smiled one of his odd and distant smiles. “Sounds promising. A sort of map …”

  “A sacred map,” I said.

  “Sacred. Exactly. Very clever, Jeremy. In fact, I—”

  He would have said more, but Michelle barged onto the balcony to regale him with some idea of her own. She had been reading too many of Deirdre’s New Age tracts, or simply drinking too much; she was flushed and semicoherent, tugging Carver’s sleeve as she talked, something about posttemporal deities, model worlds, gods from the end of time.

  The party wound down around two. We gently hastened hence our last guest an hour later and went to bed without washing the dishes. Michelle was less feverish but still feeling the alcohol; she was impatient about making love. Drinking makes her eager, but I don’t drink and have always found her occasional drunkenness an antiaphrodisiac; her breath smelled like a chem lab and she looked at me as if she wasn’t quite sure who had tumbled into bed with her.

  But she was still fundamentally beautiful, still the brash and intelligent woman I had married a dozen years ago, and if our climaxes that night drew us deeper into ourselves and farther from each other … well, here’s a mystery I have never understood: ecstasy hates company.

  One more thing I remember from that time. (And memory is the point of writing this.) We woke to breakfast among the ruins. Actually we took breakfast about eleven, on the balcony, because the weather had turned lovely and cool, and the sun came slantwise between the bars of the railing and warmed our feet. Michelle mimed a hangover but said she actually felt okay, just a little rueful. Wide sheepish grin. We turned our faces to the breeze and sipped orange juice. We didn’t talk about the contest, except this:

  “Carver’s interesting,” she said. “Funny, I never really noticed him before.”

  “You noticed him last night.”

  “Well, that’s the point. He used to be so quiet.”

  Did he? He struck me as evasive, mercurial—the whole idea of John Carver had become slippery. I wondered aloud who had brought him to the group.

  Michelle looked at me curiously. “You did, genius. Last year sometime.”

  Was that possible? Carver had audited one of my classes—that was the first I saw of him—but afterward?

  “A couple of meetings at Hart House,” Michelle supplied. “He read your Coleridge book. Then you brought him to a Friday night and introduced him around. You said he was bright but a little withdrawn, sort of a lost puppy.”

  Funny thing to forget.

  I let the challenge slide for a month or so. By daylight, it lost some of its charm. Labor Day passed, and I was obliged to
untangle the annual knotted shoestring of schedules and lectures, the endless autumn minutiae. In what began as a half-gesture toward the contest, I took up walking again.

  Not that I had ever completely abandoned it. By “walking” I mean long, late walks—walks without destination, often after midnight, sometimes until dawn. Compulsive as much as therapeutic. I lived in one of the few cities in North America where such urban wandering was less than mortally dangerous, and I had learned the places to avoid—the after-hours clubs, the hustlers’ alleys, the needle parks.

  All this, of course, constitutes suspicious behavior. Cops are apt to stop you and read your I.D. into their dashboard databanks. Young male steroid abusers from the suburbs on a gay-bashing soiree might turn their attention your way. Some years ago a belligerent drunk had broken my jaw, for reasons known only to himself.

  I think even Michelle wondered about these expeditions at first. I wouldn’t have been the first dutiful husband with a secret career in the midnight toilet stalls. But that wasn’t it. The only solace I wanted or needed was the solace of an empty street. It clears the mind and comforts the soul.

  At least, it used to.

  Walking took my mind off my work and turned it back toward Carver’s challenge. I was neither religious nor dogmatically atheistic—I had years ago shelved all those issues in a category marked “Unanswerable Questions,” after which what more was there to say? I had been raised in a benign Anglicanism and had shed it without trauma. But I wasn’t empty of the religious impulse. It’s no secret that my fascination with the Romantic poets was equally a fascination with their opiated gnosticism, their sense of an aeternitas haunting every crag and glen.

  What is perhaps strange is that the city gave me the same sensation. We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.

  I think I had always known this. When I was seven years old and allowed to stay up to see The Naked City (intrigued even then by the title), the best part wasn’t the melodrama but the opening credits, the ABC announcer’s “There are a million stories in the Naked City,” which I understood as a great and terrible truth.

  So my religion of the city would have to unite the two domains, the gnostic and the urban. Paracartography implied the making of maps, city maps, a map of this city, but not an ordinary map; a map of the city’s secret terrains, the city as perceived by a divine madman, streets rendered as ecstasies or purgatories; a map legible only at night, in the dark.

  Too complex and senseless a piece of work, even with fifteen hundred dollars at stake, but I couldn’t dismiss it, and wondered if some hint of the idea might be enough to take the pot.

  I thought about it as I walked—one night a week, sometimes two, rarely three. I bought a pocket notebook in case of inspiration. I carried paracartography with me like a favorite paperback novel, always at the back of my mind waiting for a free hour or a tedious subway ride or, best of all, an evening’s walk.

  But the walks were still their own reward. Even after almost a quarter century of periodic exploration there were still neighborhoods and terrains that took me absolutely by surprise, and surprise was the purpose and reward of the exercise: to come around a corner and find some black and shadowed warehouse, some abandoned railway siding, an angle of moonlight on a crumbling coal silo.

  What I rediscovered that autumn was my ability to get lost. Toronto is a forgiving city, essentially a gridwork of streets as formal and uninspiring as its banks. Walk in any direction long enough, you’ll find a landmark or a familiar bus route. As a rule. But the invention of paracartography exercised such trancelike power that I was liable to walk without any sense of time or direction and find myself, hours later, in a wholly new neighborhood, as if my feet had followed a map of their own.

  Which was precisely what I wanted. Automatic pathfinding, like automatic writing. How better to begin a paracartographic survey?

  The only trouble was that I began to look a little ragged at work. Friends inquired about my health. I didn’t feel the sleep deprivation but I began to use drops to disguise the inevitable red-eye. My best friends worried more than I thought appropriate.

  One afternoon early in October I phoned Michelle to tell her I’d be late, took transit to the Dundas subway station, transferred to a streetcar and rode it east until I felt like getting off. Heady, that first moment of freedom. The air was crisp, the sun was about to set on the other side of the Don River Valley. I remember a cheap meal, curry and fried bread at a Pakistani diner while I watched the traffic through a steam-drenched window. Then out again into the fresh night. I walked west, where the sky was still faintly blue.

  I remember the first evening star over the Armory; I remember amber streetlights reflected in the barred and dusty windows of Church Street pawnshops; I remember the sound of my own footsteps on empty sidewalks….

  But memory falters (more often now), and apart from a general sensation of cold and uncertainty, the next thing I remember is finding myself in full daylight, about a half block from Deirdre’s gem shop.

  According to my watch it was after ten, a sunny Saturday morning. There was no place I had to be. But Michelle might be worried. I stopped by the shop to use the phone.

  Deirdre was at the back, hanging dream-catchers from the pegboard ceiling. Kathy, her other part-timer, lounged behind the counter looking impatient. “Morning, Dr. Singer,” she trilled.

  Deirdre looked down from her stepladder. “Hey, Jeremy. Geez, look at you. Been eroding the shoe leather again?”

  “It shows?”

  “Sort of a Bataan Death March look …”

  “Tactful as ever. Mind if I call Michelle?”

  “My guest.”

  Michelle was relieved to hear from me, said she hadn’t been worried but would I be home for lunch? I told her I would and put the phone back under the counter.

  “Don’t sneak off,” Deirdre said. “Kathy can mind the store a while. Buy me coffee.”

  I said I could spare half an hour.

  She stopped at a hardware store across the street and bought a box of houseplant fertilizer. “For the ladies?” I asked.

  “The ladies.”

  Deirdre’s “ladies” were the female marijuana plants she grew in her basement. If Deirdre trusted you, she’d tell you about her garden. I had seen it once, a fragrant emerald oasis tucked into the cupboard under the stairs and illuminated with a football-sized halide bulb. She grew cannabis for her own use and to my knowledge never sold any, though Deirdre was so customarily level-headed and so seldom publicly stoned that I wondered what exactly she used it for. She was a pothead but not a social pot-head; she kept her intoxications to herself.

  We bought coffee at a Starbucks and took a window table. Deirdre gulped her her double latte and frowned at me. “You really do look like shit, Jeremy. And you don’t smell much better.”

  Half-moons of sweat under my arms. I was aware of my own stink, the low-tide smell of too much exercise on a cold night. My thighs ached and my feet were throbbing. I admitted I might have overdone it a little.

  “So where’d you go?”

  “Started out across the Don, ended up here.”

  “That’s not an all-night walk.”

  “I took the scenic route.”

  “And saw—?”

  I realized I didn’t have an answer. An image flitted past my mind’s eye, of a gray street, gray flagstone storefronts, shuttered second-story windows, but the memory was sepia-toned, faded, fading. “Shadows on a cavern wall,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Plato.”

  “You’re so fucked up sometimes.” She paused. “Listen, Jeremy, is ev
erything okay between you and Michelle?”

  “Me and Michelle? Why do you ask?”

  “That’s an evasion. Why do I ask? I ask because I’m a nosy old lady who can’t mind her own business. Also because I’m your friend.”

  “Has she said something?”

  “No. Nothing at all. It’s just—”

  “Just what?”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. “If I say it’s a hunch, that doesn’t cut much ice, huh?”

  “If it’s a hunch, Deirdre, I’d say thanks for thinking of us, but your hunch is wrong. We’re fine.”

  “There’s something that happens to married people. They lose track of each other. Everything’s routine, you know, dinner and TV and bed, but meanwhile they’re sailing separate boats, spiritually I mean. Until one of ’em wakes up alone, going, ‘What the fuck?””

  “Thank you, Dr. Ruth.”

  “Well, okay.” The last half of her coffee chased the first. “So are you writing another book?”

  “What?”

  “That little notepad sticking out of your pocket. And your pen’s starting to leak, there, Jeremy.”

  I grabbed the ballpoint out of my pocket, but the shirt was going to be a casualty. As for the notebook, I began to tell Deirdre how I kept it around for inspiration regarding the Challenge, but it was empty so fan … except it wasn’t empty.

  “Good part of a book right there,” Deirdre said, watching me flip through the pages.

  Every page was filled. The handwriting was tiny and cramped, but it looked like my own.

  Only one problem. I couldn’t read a word.

  Here the question becomes: Why didn’t I see a doctor?

  It wouldn’t have helped, of course, but I didn’t know that then. And I had read enough pop-medical books to realize that the combination of periodic fugues and graphomania spelled big trouble, at least potentially.

  Nor was I afraid of doctors. In my forty-one years I had made it through an appendectomy, a kidney stone, and two impacted wisdom teeth. No big deal.