The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was always Leah who did hostess duty at the Bridger house, answering the door or the phone, serving drinks. Paul himself had long ago settled into a placid domesticity untroubled by such peasant chores. “He’s in the front room,” Leah whispered into my ear, and I gave her a quick embrace.

  Which she did not enthusiastically return. When I tried to meet her eyes, she looked away.

  “Close the door,” she said briskly. “Before Ulysses gets out.”

  She had been drinking, I thought.

  She took the wine bottle to the kitchen.

  Leah had restrained her husband’s decorative instincts in the more public parts of the house. Here in the spacious front room, the only concessions to Paul’s eclecticism were a framed Hopi weaving of no particular merit or value, an audio system cobbled out of fifty-year-old black and chrome vacuum-tube components, and an African ritual mask that looked very Bell, Book and Candle against the textured buff-orange wall. As a decor statement, it announced Genteel Eccentricity Held Within Acceptable Bounds.

  And here, in a large but fashionable easy chair, was Paul Bridger himself, smiling benignly.

  I didn’t dislike Paul Bridger. My designs on Leah had nothing to do with Paul, or so I told myself. Paul and I had been friends since our undergraduate days. If I resented anything about Paul, it was that he had achieved virtually everything he wanted in life and had accepted this good fortune, not exactly arrogantly, but as his due… That is, yes, he knew he was lucky, and wasn’t it mildly amusing that so much had come his way so easily?

  But then, he wasn’t exactly Bill Gates. His needs were simple and he satisfied them on a regular basis; he enjoyed a modest but secure tenure at the University of Toronto, which was exactly as it should be; a little family money made possible the amenities, such as this house. And he had married the perfect wife. Leah occasionally mentioned the possibility of children (forlornly), but that had never happened, probably because children wouldn’t have fit into Paul’s schematically ideal existence.

  Does that make him sound boring—a Babbitt, a nebbish? Don’t be deceived. He had a quick and open mind and a grasp of history (both mainstream and off-trail) that made him a popular guest at faculty barbecues. And he loved to talk.

  I said, “What have you got to show me?”

  He smiled. “You know better than that, Matthew. There has to be an overture before the curtain goes up. Have a seat.”

  I settled at the near end of the sofa, hoping Leah might join me there for a little illicit knee-touching. But when she came into the room she just offered aperitifs and wandered off again. She seemed preoccupied, abstracted.

  Paul talked about the old days.

  “I think about Ulysses sometimes,” Paul Bridger said. “Leah? Where is the old reprobate at the moment?”

  Leah’s voice came from the kitchen but seemed much farther away. “I saw him up in the bedroom a little while ago. He was looking at the moon.”

  Ulysses was Paul’s cat, ten years old, a fat mongrel (can you call a cat a mongrel?) with some Siamese in his ancestry. As if on cue, or maybe he heard his name, Ulysses came stalking through the room with his tail in the air. His fur was spotted with orange, his eyes were as green and bright as a go light—a patchwork quilt of a cat. “He’s nervous tonight,” Paul said. “All that ruckus outside,” meaning the female-animal-in-heat I had heard from the walk. “Ulysses is neutered, of course, but he knows something’s up, and it interests him.”

  But Ulysses wasn’t allowed outside. Traffic on one side of the house, a ravine full of foxes and skunks on the other, bad news for an animal as thoroughly domesticated as Ulysses.

  Ulysses padded through the hallway to the front door and yowled. Leah called “Hush!” from the kitchen, where she was still fixing food or sneaking a drink.

  “Sometimes,” Paul said, “I look at Ulysses and think about those dormitory bull sessions we used to have. You remember that, Matthew?”

  Of course I remembered that. I remembered sitting up often until dawn, Paul and I and a circle of friends in the dormitory commons, sorting out life, the universe, and everything. My parents were the kind who worried that I’d go to college and end up smoking fortified cigarettes and using words like “empowered” and “patriarchal,” and I had been perfectly happy to fulfill their expectations. Those of us who reach middle age without children of our own are allowed to own up to these things. We call them fond memories.

  “There was that engineering student,” Paul said, “remember Ken Schroeder? The one who read science fiction and was always going on about the next stage of evolution, the Superior Being…?”

  Yes, and we had pilloried him for it. The ubermensch: it had seemed such a quaintly totalitarian notion, reeking of eugenics and Nordic Purity. Also, it was easy to make Schroeder blush. He had bad gums and dandruff. Homo superior, right. (I had actually run into Ken Schroeder a couple of months ago. He does industrial design for a major architectural firm now, pulls in a couple of hundred K a year. Balding, but his teeth are perfect.)

  “Well,” Paul said, “I’ve been thinking about that off and on for, what is it, almost twenty-five years now? More often when I’m around Ulysses. Because it’s an interesting question, if you ask it the right way. Matthew, are you an animal-rights person?”

  I shrugged. “I eat meat. I refrain from clubbing baby harp seals.”

  “Because I don’t want to be misunderstood. If I say we are, as a species, superior to Ulysses and his kind, I’m not presuming a moral superiority. Human beings aren’t necessarily the crown of creation and Ulysses may not be a lesser creature than you or I, in the grand scheme of things. Still, there is indisputably a wide range of things we can do, as a species, that Ulysses can’t. Write poetry, map the stars, do calculus, build bridges. All of this is beyond the ken of our four-footed cousin, yes?”

  “Granted.”

  “So let’s reconsider the old dorm room debate. What if there was a creature superior to us in all the ways we are superior to Ulysses? Would we even know such a being existed?”

  I didn’t really care. My appetite for this kind of sophomore philosophy had waned with middle age. What I wanted was some time with Leah. I needed to find out what had changed since Paul’s last party, when she had taken me into the cedar-scented darkness back of the garden and kissed me and cried a little at the strangeness of her betrayal.

  But she came in with a plate of carrot sticks and sour cream and sat listlessly in a dim corner of the room. She gave the window an uneasy look, then rose to draw the curtain against the moonlight.

  Ulysses continued to complain of his confinement in eerie Siamese wails.

  Paul wanted me to play along. I said, “I read all those stories, too. Somebody who can do higher math in his head, interpret Mozart, read minds. And gets to forgive brutal mankind its adolescent folly as he’s burned at the stake. Homo superior. That guy.”

  “Do you suppose that’s how Ulysses sees us?”

  I shrugged. “In his terms, maybe.”

  “Clearly not. Show me the cat who believes he lives in the midst of superior beings. Nonsense. Bullshit. In point of fact, Ulysses doesn’t find us in the least frightening or intimidating—we’re far less scary than the Doberman down the block. And why would a cat consider us superior when in all the things that matter to cat-kind—chasing and killing things and fucking and establishing territory—we’re barely capable?”

  Leah, who had contributed nothing to the conversation up to this point, said: “But we do chase and kill things. As a species. We’re incredibly good at it, actually.”

  “Certainly, but it all takes place in a realm Ulysses can’t penetrate or comprehend. And that’s the point. Ninety percent of what we consider vitally important is, to Ulysses, either imperceptible or completely trivial.”

  I tried to sort this out. “You’re saying a superior being wouldn’t be obviously superior.”

  He grinned. “Exactly. The opposite, in fact. As far as Ulysses
is concerned, Leah and I are actually more catlike than the other creatures he encounters. We groom him; we feed him. We’re about as unpreposessing, in his eyes, as that sofa you’re sitting on.”

  “Okay,” I said, “and this means…?”

  “Well, to draw the most vulgar inference first, it means the Superior Being could be walking among us today and not attracting attention.”

  Leah shook her head. “Not necessarily. We’re reasoning beings, which Ulysses isn’t. We would know.”

  “Ulysses reasons all the time. He figured out how to spring the latch on the pantry, remember?”

  “But,” Leah insisted, “he doesn’t know he reasons.”

  “Is that important? Maybe we really are the pearl of evolution and there is nothing that can outthink or outperceive us—maybe sentience has a ceiling, and we’ve reached it. But maybe not. We can at least consider the alternative.”

  “Well,” Leah conceded darkly, “it’s not like it matters or anything.”

  Paul ignored her. I said, “If this being exists, and if he’s essentially imperceptible, Leah’s right. It doesn’t matter; it can’t matter.”

  “Except for two things,” Paul said. “Artifacts and sleight of hand.”

  Could Paul have found out about Leah and I? Had she said something to him? It was at least possible. Paul was capable of many things, perhaps even of maintaining this glib insouciance while plotting to stab me with a pickle fork.

  But it hardly seemed likely.

  I looked at Leah, feeling a rush of warmth that was hard to conceal. I thought I loved her. Yes, that word. It had occured to me only lately that I loved Leah Bridger, though we had flirted for years and I had always liked her immensely. She was, I thought, a little martyred by her marriage; she cared for Paul, but their relationship hadn’t evolved the way she’d hoped. He was too self-sufficient to really love anyone. She delighted him—he made that plain enough—but delight isn’t love.

  Leah owned a degree in visual arts but had never worked outside the home. That was Paul’s preference. And she had kept her figure; that was Paul’s preference, too, I think. Once, years ago, he had told me he liked women “underfed and underfoot.” (When I ragged him about the gross incorrectness of this he smiled innocently but never repeated the phrase. At least not in my presence.)

  So my ambitions may not have been especially noble, but I wasn’t here just to get laid, either. I did care about Leah. I had been telling myself so on a daily basis.

  I looked at her, trying to shoot a warmth-and-comfort vibe across the room. She regarded me distantly and lit a cigarette.

  Leah had stopped smoking in 1987.1 remembered the ordeal. When had she started again?

  She waved out a match and exhaled a blue halo of smoke. Paul wrinkled his nose.

  “Artifacts?” I said. “Sleight of hand?”

  “Here’s the question. When, if ever, does Ulysses suspect that human beings are more than they seem? When does our uniqueness impinge on him in some way?”

  “When we talk about having him put down,” Leah said.

  Paul looked hurt. “No, and anyway we wouldn’t do a thing like that. Shame on you. No, but he gets freaked out by our artifacts once in a while. You remember your Sylvester slippers?”

  Leah had gotten a pair of slippers one Christmas (a gift from some demented uncle) in the likeness of Sylvester the Cat. Big rolling plush-toy eyes, black fur, nylon whiskers.

  Paul turned to me. “Ulysses could not abide those slippers. It was as if Leah’s feet had been taken over by aliens. His fur would bristle; he’d growl and arch his back. We had to throw the slippers out, and it still took him a good day to settle down. We—human beings—had manufactured an artifact that sent all the wrong cat signals. Ulysses’ experience of a higher being is therefore an experience of the unnatural, the eerie.

  “Likewise sleight of hand. When Ulysses was a kitten, I would roll a rubber ball for him to chase. Great game. He loved it. Except when I cupped the ball in my hand and pretended to throw it. He’d jump up, follow the trajectory, and—no ball! Hey, presto! It’s a trick that wouldn’t fool a two-year-old more than once, but Ulysses always fell for it. And it bothered him. You could tell. He’d let out this quizzical little mewling sound and scratch at the carpet.”

  “So,” I said, “the only evidence we would have of a Superior Being would be things that make us feel… quizzical?”

  “Things that aren’t natural,” Leah interpreted. Her voice was cold. The cat emitted another yowl from some far-off room of the house. “Things that make the hair on your neck stand up.”

  “Arm,” I said.

  She frowned. “What?”

  “People always say, ‘The hair on your neck.’ I mean, I know the feeling. But it’s the hair on my arms that prickles. Not the neck.”

  Paul looked at me as if he forgave this unfortunate descent into trivia. (Nevertheless, it’s something I’ve noticed about myself. A good campfire story makes the hair on my arms stand at attention. This was explained to me once: something about the arrector pili muscles and the fight-or-flight reflex.)

  Leah gave Paul a long evaluating stare. “Why don’t you just show him the rock?”

  Paul went off to rummage in his study (presumably for “the rock”) while Leah poured herself yet another drink. I waylaid her in the kitchen. It was one of those chrome kitchens, all mirror surfaces. Our reflections glared back at us from a dozen angles.

  I put my hands on her shoulders. She said, “Matthew, don’t.”

  I backed off and looked, I guess, hurt.

  We may not have been lovers, but we had known each other a long time. The unspoken question was obvious and I didn’t have to ask it.

  She looked briefly ashamed. “There’s nothing between us, you know, but a little loneliness.”

  “It could be more.”

  She shook her head firmly. “No, Matthew. No, it couldn’t. People like us, we’re like shadows orbiting a vacuum. We have nothing to give each other.”

  I was too hurt to react sensibly. “How very Sylvia Plath,” I said.

  Which made her angry. “Fuck you,” she muttered. I went back to the living room.

  “It is a rock,” I said.

  Paul was holding it in his hand. The rock was about the size of a potato. “I told you so.”

  “You told me you dug it out of the garden, too, but I assumed that was some kind of metaphor.”

  “There you have me, Matthew. No, I didn’t literally dig it out of the garden, though it looks just about that prosaic, doesn’t it? I bought it at Finders, as a matter of fact. As a paperweight.”

  Finders was the name of a run-down secondhand bookshop near the University. Paul loved the place. I had been there, but it didn’t impress me. It offered a few blowsy first editions, a big section of occult nonsense in the Madame Blavatsky tradition, forgotten junk novels from the fifties. And a little knickknack shelf cluttered with fake Wedgwood and cracked china dolls and Victorian mirrors and, evidently, rocks. I said, “You bought a rock?”

  “It’s a scrying rock.”

  It was a smooth lump of whatever it is commonplace rocks are made of, lusterless gray with a few chunks of quartz randomly embedded. “You paid money for this?”

  “Don’t be facetious. I got change back from a dollar. But the appearance of the artifact is consistent with our thesis, Matthew. Ulysses, for instance, has no way of distinguishing a man-made object from a natural object. The distinction between a rubber ball and a pebble is not categorical, in the cat’s mind. Both are round; one is hard and one is soft; they have distinguishing smells, and so on, but as for their purpose or provenance—he can’t even phrase the question.”

  “So the artifact of a Superior Being might look to us like a fucking rock?”

  “As well a rock as something else. The point is, what makes this rock special would be instantly obvious to our Superior Being and vague, at best, to the rest of us.”

  I said, “Vague if no
t imaginary. My arm hairs aren’t standing up, Paul.”

  He smiled benignly and said, “Hold it in your hand.”

  I understand about the power of suggestion.

  It was a moonlit night in autumn. Ulysses was wailing like a lost soul, and something out there in the dark was answering him. Leah had turned away from me for no apparent reason. And Paul insisted on ghost stories.

  But it had stopped being frightening. The evening had grown tedious and bitter and I wanted to leave. Why stay?

  I took the rock in my hand.

  It was not warm. It did not radiate a strange electricity.

  “Hold it a while,” Paul said. “Close your eyes.”

  I closed my eyes and heard Paul settling into his chair, Leah bumping around in the kitchen, Ulysses walking the stations of his discontent. No more. No dreamlike images sprang to mind. No unusual sensations, only the usual minor discomforts. (I had cinched my belt a notch too tight in an effort to impress Leah with my youthful waistline. My shoes pinched.)

  Given that Paul’s exegesis had lead up to this stunning anticlimax, I let my thoughts drift to Leah.

  Had her drinking become a problem? She had always had a thing for what we euphemistically call “substances,” including an expensive cocaine habit when that was still fashionable. Much of this I had put down to her unhappiness with Paul, from which I had lately longed to rescue her… but some of it must have been intrinsic to her nature, some unacknowledged and unProzac’d darkness out of her childhood. There are people for whom unhappiness is a default state. Maybe Leah had stayed with Paul all these years because with Paul she could be functionally unhappy. He made room for her depression. He tolerated it. Indulged it. Remained impervious to it. He was, above all else, reliable.