The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Of course a brain tumor would have been a big deal, but the idea of talking to a doctor didn’t even occur to me; it was beyond the pale, unnecessary, absurd. What had happened was not a medical but a metaphysical mystery. I think it half delighted me.

  And half terrified me. But the terror was metaphysical too. If this discontinuity was not imaginary then it must be external, which implied that I had crossed a real boundary, that I had stepped at least a little distance into the land beyond the mirror.

  In short, I didn’t think about it rationally.

  But I did think about it. Come November, I thought about it almost constantly.

  The details of a descent into obsession are familiar enough. I came to believe in my own psychological invulnerability even as friends began to ask delicately whether I might not want to “see someone.” I let my work slide. Missed lectures. I told myself I was achieving a valuable insight into the Romantic sensibility, and I suppose that was true; Novalis’s hero eternally hunting his blue flower could hardly have been more single-minded.

  Single-mindedly, I began to assemble my map.

  I won’t tell you how I did it. In any case there was no single method, only materials and intuition. I will say that I obtained the largest and most comprehensive survey map of the city I could find and then began to distort and overlay it according to my own perceptions, certain that each new deposit of ink and color, each Mylar transparency, was not obscuring the city but revealing it—the occult, the hidden city.

  I kept the work private, but we all did in a Challenge; even Michelle and I were competing for that fifteen hundred dollars (though the money was the least of my considerations). She didn’t mention temporal deities to me. And although she knew something had gone awry—for one thing, our sex life suffered—she said very little. Humoring me, I thought. The good and faithful wife. But she didn’t have to speak; I read a volume of recrimination in her frowns and silences, and there were moments when I hated her for it.

  “You realize,” Deirdre said, “he’s fucking us over.”

  November had come in on the last breath of autumn, sunny and warm. Deirdre had shown up early for our Friday night, the night we judged the Challenge. Michelle was busy in the kitchen. I sat with Deirdre on the balcony, the fragile heat of the day evaporating fast.

  Deirdre wore XL denim bib overalls and a baseball cap turned sideways. She took a joint from the grimy deeps of her purse and held it up. “Mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Want to share?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She hunted for a lighter. “We don’t even know who he is or where he comes from.”

  She was talking about John Carver. “He’s been shy about his past, true.”

  “He’s not shy about anything, Jeremy. Haven’t you figured that out? If there’s something he hasn’t told us, it’s ’cause he doesn’t want us to know.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “Watch him tonight. He’s the center of attention. We huddle at his feet like he’s Socrates or something, and people forget it wasn’t always like that. Better yet, keep your eyes off Carver and look at the crowd. It’s like hypnotism, what he does. He radiates this power, this very deliberate sexual thing, and it pins people. I mean, they don’t blink!”

  “He’s charismatic.”

  “I guess so. Up to a point. I don’t get it, myself. And he does not welcome criticism, our Mr. Carver.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  She lit the joint and exhaled a wisp of piney smoke. “Try it and see.”

  If I had been less concerned with my map I might have paid Deirdre closer attention. But I was nervous. Now that the map was about to become public it began to seem doomed, chimerical, stupid. I considered forfeiting the prize money and keeping my obsession to myself.

  More guests arrived. The group was slightly diminished lately. A few regulars had dropped out. There were seven of us present when we took up the Challenge.

  Each participant was allowed ten minutes in which to convince the others he or she deserved the prize. Showmanship counted. The contest was graded point-wise and we were scrupulously fair; it benefited no one to deliberately mark down the competition—and we were honorable people, even with fifteen hundred dollars at stake.

  I forget who went first. Some ideas were novel, some halfhearted. Ellie Cochrane, one of Chuck Byrnie’s students, proposed a sort of techno-divination, reading the future in blank-channel TV noise. Ted Fishbeinder, an Arts Department teaching assistant, did a funny riff on “esthetic precognition,” in which, for instance, the Surrealist movement represented a “psychic plagiarism” of contemporary rock videos.

  Then it was Michelle’s turn.

  She used more than her allotted time, but nobody said a word. We were astonished. Myself most of all. Michelle wasn’t much of a public speaker, and her part in previous Challenges had always been low-key. But this Challenge was different.

  She spoke with a steady, articulate passion, and her eyes were fixed on Carver throughout.

  Suppose, she said—and this is the best recollection I can muster—suppose that sentient creatures become their own God. That is, suppose God is human intellect at the end of time, a kind of ideological white hole in which consciousness engulfs the universe that created it. And suppose, furthermore, that the flow of time is not unidirectional. Information may be extracted from the past, or the past re-created in the body of God. Might not our freshly created supreme being (or beings) reach back into human history and commit miracles?

  But take it another step, Michelle said: Suppose the ideological gods want to re-create history in miniature, to rerun each consecutive moment of universal history as a sort of goldfish bowl at the end of the universe.

  Would we know, if we were such a simulation? Probably not… but there might be clues, Michelle said, and she enumerated a few. (Physics, she said, asks us to believe in a discontinuous quantum-level universe that actually makes more sense if interpreted as information—a “digital” universe, hence infinitely simulatable … or already a simulation!)

  And there was much more, speculation on ideological entities, the multiple nature of God, wars in Heaven—but memory fails.

  I do remember John Carver returning her stare, the silent communication that seemed to pass between them. Mentor and student, I thought. Maybe he’d helped her with this.

  When she finished, we all took a deep breath. Chuck Byrnie murmured, “We seem to have a winner.” There was scattered applause.

  It was a tough act to follow. I let Michelle dash to the kitchen before I screwed up my courage and brought out the map—poor feeble thing it now seemed. A round of drinks, then the crowd gathered. I stumbled through an explanation of paracartography that sounded incoherent even to me, and then I displayed the map, by this time a thickly layered palimpsest of acetate and rainbow-colored acrylic paints and cryptic keys legible only to myself. Nobody reacted visibly to it, but for me the map was a silent reassurance, pleasant to stand next to, like a fire on a cold night. Maybe no one else sensed its power, but I did. I felt the promise of its unfollowed and hidden avenues, the scrolls of spiritual code concealed in its deeps.

  The map, I thought, would speak for itself.

  Eventually Chuck Byrnie averted his eyes from it. “Enterprising,” he said. “More art than map. Still, it’s quite wonderful, Jeremy. You should be proud. But why is it empty at the center?”

  “Eh?” The question took me by surprise.

  “I mean to say, why is it blank in the middle? I can see how it bears a certain relationship to the city, and those arteries or veins, there, might be streets … but it seems odd, to have left such a hole in the middle.”

  No one objected. Everybody seemed to think this was a reasonable question.

  I stared at the map. Squinted at the map. But try as I might, I couldn’t see “a hole in the middle.” The map was continuous, a single seamless thing.

  I felt suddenly queasy. H
e waited for an answer, frowning.

  “Terra incognita,” I said breathlessly. “Here there be tygers, Chuck.”

  “I see.”

  I didn’t.

  Deirdre was the last contestant, and we were all a little tired. Midnight passed. Michelle had brought out the basswood box, and it rested on the coffee table waiting for a winner, but it had ceased to be the centerpiece of the evening.

  Chuck Byrnie yawned.

  Deirdre wouldn’t win the prize, and I think we all knew it. But this wasn’t only pro forma. Watch Carver, she had said. And I did: I watched Carver watch Deirdre. He watched her fiercely. No one else seemed to notice (and I know the obvious is often invisible), but the expression on his face looked like hatred, hatred pure as distilled vitriol. For a moment I had the terrifying feeling that an animal was loose in the room. Something subtle and vicious and quick.

  Deirdre said, “I think we should reconsider the history of divine intervention.”

  She looked frail, I thought, for all her twenty or thirty excess pounds, her apparent solidity. Her eyes were bright, nervous. She looked like prey.

  Every culture, she said, has a folk tradition of alien visitations. Think of Pan, the sidhe, Conan Doyle’s fairies, Terence McKenna’s “machine elves,” or any of the thousands of North American men and women who fervently and passionately believe they’ve been abducted by almond-eyed space creatures.

  It isn’t a pretty history, Deirdre said. Look at it dispassionately. Much as we might want to believe in benign or enlightened spirits, what do these creatures do? Kidnap people, rape women, mutilate cattle, substitute changelings for human infants, cast lives into disarray. They mislead and they torture.

  If these creatures are not wholly imaginary, Deirdre said, then we should regard them as dangerous. Also sadistic, petty, lascivious, and very powerful. However seductive they might sometimes seem, they’re clearly hostile and ought to be resisted in any way possible.

  Carver said, “That seems a little glib. What do you suppose these creatures want from us? What’s in it for them, Deirdre?”

  “I can’t imagine. Maybe they’re Michelle’s ’temporal deities’—half-gods, with the kind of mentality that delights in picking wings off flies. There’s a sexual component in most of these stories. Sex and cruelty.”

  “They sound more human than divine.”

  “I think we’re a playground for them. They inhabit a much larger world. We’re an anthill, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “But why the hatred?”

  “Even an ant can bite.”

  “Time’s up,” Chuck Byrnie said.

  “Thank you, Deirdre,” John Carver said. “Very insightful. Let’s tally the votes.”

  There’s a city inside the city—the city at the center of the map.

  I couldn’t see the hole in the map because for me there was no hole: the gap closed when I looked at it, or else the most important part of the map was invisible to anyone but myself.

  And that made sense. What I had failed to understand was that paracartography must necessarily be a private matter. My map isn’t your map. The ideal paracartographical map charts not a territory but a mind, or at least it merges the two: the inner inner city.

  Michelle took the prize. She seemed less pleased with the money than with John Carver’s obvious approval.

  Deirdre took me aside as the evening ended. “Jeremy.”

  “Mm?”

  “Are you blind or just stupid?”

  “Do I get another choice?”

  “I’m serious.” She sighed. “There’s something in you, Jeremy, something a little lost and obsessive, and he found that—he dug it out of you like digging a stone out of the ground. He used it, and he’s still using it. It amuses him to watch us screw around with these scary ideas like little kids playing with blasting caps.”

  “Deirdre, I don’t need a lecture.”

  “What you need is a wake-up call. Ah, hell, Jeremy…. This is not the kind of news I love to deliver, but it’s obvious she’s sleeping with him. Please think about it.”

  I stared at her. Then I said, “Time to leave, Deirdre.”

  “It matters to me what happens to you guys.”

  “Just go.”

  Michelle went wordlessly to bed.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I sat on the balcony under a duvet, watching the city. At half-past three, the peak (or valley) of the night, I thought I saw the city itself in all its luminous grids begin subtly to shift, to move without moving, to part and make a passage where none had been.

  I closed my aching eyes and went inside. The map was waiting for me.

  My department head suggested a sabbatical. She also suggested I consult a mental health specialist.

  I took the time off, gratefully. It was convenient to be able to sleep during the day.

  There is a city inside the city, but the road there is tortuous and strange.

  I glimpsed that city for the first time in December, late on a cold night.

  I was tired. I’d come a long way. The lost city was not, at first sight, distinctly different. It possessed, if anything, a haunting familiarity, and only gradually did I wake to its strangeness and charm.

  I found myself on an empty street of two- or three-story brick buildings. The buildings looked at least sixty or seventy years old, though the capstones had no dates. The brick was gray and ancient, the upper-story windows shuttered and dark. Remnants of Depression era advertising clung to the walls like scabs.

  The storefronts weren’t barred. Cracks laced the window glass. The goods dimly visible behind the panes were generic, neglected, carelessly heaped together: pyramids of patent leather shoes or racks of paperback books in various languages. The businesses were marginal, tobacco shops or junk shops or shops that sold back-issue magazines or canned food without labels. Their tattered awnings rattled in the wind.

  It sounds dreary, but it wasn’t, at least not in my eyes; it was a small magic, this inexplicable neighborhood glazed with December moonlight, chill and perfect as a black pearl. It should not have existed. Didn’t exist. I couldn’t place it in any customary part of the city nor could I discern any obvious landmarks (the CN Tower, the bank buildings). Streets parted and met again like the meanders of a slow river, and the horizon was perpetually hidden.

  The only light brighter than the winter moon came from an all-hours coffee shop at a corner bereft of street signs. The air inside was moist but still cold. Two men in dowdy overcoats sat huddled over a faded Formica tabletop. Behind the cash counter, a middle-aged woman in a hairnet looked at me blankly.

  “Coffee,” I said, and she poured a cup, and I took it. It didn’t occur to me to pay, and she didn’t ask.

  Things work differently at the heart of the heart of the city.

  And yet it was familiar. It ached with memory. I’d been here before, sometime outside the reasonable discourse of history.

  I took my notebook from my jacket pocket. Maybe this was where I had invented my ideoglyphs, or where the invisible city had generated them, somehow, itself. I flipped open the notepad and was only mildly surprised to find the words suddenly, crisply legible. This did not astonish me—I was past that—but I read the contents with close attention.

  Every page was a love letter. Concise, nostalgic, sad, sincere, my own. And every page was addressed to Michelle.

  Finding my way home was difficult. The hidden city encloses itself. There are no parallel lines in the hidden city. Streets cross themselves at false intersections. There are, I think, many identical streets, the peeling Edwardian town houses and bare maples layered like fossil shale. I don’t know how long it took to find my way back, nor could I say just where the border lay or when I passed it, but by dawn I found myself on a pedestrian bridge where the railway tracks run south from Dundas, among the warehouses and empty coal-dust factories of the city as it should be.

  I checked my pocket, but the notebook was gone.

  M
ost of the universe is invisible—invisible in the sense of unseen, unexperienced. The deserts of Mars, the barrens of Mercury, the surfaces of a million unnamed planets, places where time passes, where a rock might tumble from a cliffside or a glacier calve into a lifeless sea, invisibly. Did you walk to work today, or take a walk after dinner? Everyday things are rendered or remain invisible: the mailbox you passed (where is it exactly?), the crack in the sidewalk, the sign in the window, this morning’s breakfast.

  I think I didn’t see Michelle. I think I hadn’t seen her for a long time.

  Have I described her? I want to. I can’t. What memory loses is invisible; it evaporates into the desert of the unseen universe.

  I’m writing this for her. For you.

  Michelle wasn’t home when I looked for her. That might have been normal or it might not. I had lost track of the days of the week. I went to look for her at Deirdre’s store.

  Winter now, skies like blue lead, a brisk and painful wind. The wind ran in fitful rivers down Bay Street and lifted scrap newspapers high above gold-mirrored windows.

  The store was closed, but I saw Deirdre moving in the dim space inside. She unlocked the door when I tapped.

  “You look—” she said.

  “Like shit. I know. You don’t look too good yourself, Deirdre.”

  She looked, in fact, frightened and sleepless.

  “I think he’s after me, Jeremy.”

  “Who, Carver?”

  “Of course Carver.”

  She pulled me inside and closed the door. Wind rattled the glass. The herbal reek of the store was overpowering.

  Deirdre unfolded a director’s chair for me, and we sat in the prism light of her window crystals. “I followed him,” she said.

  “You did what?”

  “Does that surprise you? Of course I followed him. I thought it was about time we knew something about John Carver, since he seems to know more than enough about us. Did he ever tell you where he lives?”

  “He must have.”

  “You remember what he said?”