The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She hated this bathroom. It might have been quaint, with its clawfoot tub and porcelain water closet and peeling Victorian wallpaper. It wasn’t. It was dark, it was narrow, and it reeked of genteel poverty. Like so many of the furnishings of her life, it was not something she had chosen; it was something she had arrived at.

  But the pain diminished at last. Funny how familiar pain was when you were suffering, how distant it seemed afterward. Pain was like some little animal that lived in a burrow in your stomach and came out every now and then to take the air. The cold sweat dried and she washed her face with a washcloth. The pain had left no visible evidence. She looked at herself in the mirror. Pushing sixty, Deirdre thought. How had that happened? And how old would Nick be these days—forty-eight, forty-nine? With a teenage daughter. Persephone. Only Nick would name a child Persephone. On the phone he had called her “Persey.”

  Deirdre’s hair was gray but long and full. She wore faded blue-jeans and a batiked blouse from the Goodwill. The heavy lenses of her eyeglasses had slipped down her small nose again. She bumped them back up with her thumb.

  She hid in an upstairs bedroom and rolled a joint to take away the lingering residue of discomfort. This was the resinous cannabis she had grown in the subcellar, potent but strange-tasting, dark as peat moss. It expanded into her lungs like a hot balloon and left behind its peculiar halo of strangeness and ease. She remembered reading somewhere that the ancient Scythians had smoked pot. Burned the seed clusters inside a communal hut. A sweat lodge for stoners. Had she done that herself, in some former life?

  Far away, there was a woodpecker sound. Nick and Persey at the door. Oh, God. She hid her soapstone pipe in a drawer and hurried down the stairs to let them in. A residue of pain beat in her abdomen like a hummingbird’s wings.

  She led them through the dim warren of the bookstore, through the bead curtains and up to the kitchen. Nick and Persey sat at the Ikea table while Deirdre put the kettle on for tea. “Interesting digs,” Nick said, which she supposed was his attempt to be tactful. Tact had never been Nick’s long suit.

  He sat there smiling at her, looking like any other middle-aged man. The years had erased his individuality. Back in the commune days he had dressed like a hirsute backwoodsman, his full beard framing his face, his smile quick and generous. Plaid timberjack jackets, long blond hair, dirty fingernails. Now he looked like every other millennium prole. Without the casement of his beard his lips were too full, his chin too small. He had shaved his head to disguise, or acknowledge, his hair loss. He wore a tiny gold ring in the lobe of one ear. He taught undergraduate English literature and had just landed a position at the University of Toronto, back from his decades-long exile at some women’s college or other in the American hinterland.

  “I inherited the bookstore,” Deirdre said. “The old man who owned it had no family. I was his only employee. He willed the property to me. Much to my astonishment. One of these days I’ll put it up for sale. Been planning to. But it brings in a little bit of profit most months. It’s not labor-intensive and it’s, you know, a place to live.”

  She had fixed up the upstairs living quarters, had sold or given away Oscar Ziegler’s cloying Mauve Decade furniture and replaced it with generic but modern equivalents. She had meant to paint the walls and carpet the creaking wooden floors… she just hadn’t gotten around to it.

  “It’s really interesting,” Persey observed, “in a fucked-up way.”

  She didn’t mean anything by it, but Deirdre was faintly shocked to hear her use the f-word in front of adults. Not that Deirdre herself was particularly dainty about it. Fuck, no. But Persephone was a good-looking and well-scrubbed fifteen-year-old, the sort people called “wholesome.” Times change, Deirdre supposed; most of the young people she met these days couldn’t order breakfast or make change without using the f-word.

  Nick gave his daughter a sharp look, but Deirdre said, “It is fucked up. It’s an old building and you can bet it’s not up to municipal code. The plumbing is ridiculous and I had to put new wiring in the basement just to run the washer and dryer.” Not to mention the thousand-watt metal-halide grow-light in the sub-cellar.

  “Lots to read, though,” Persey said, hastening to repair the faux pas. “It must be great living over a secondhand bookstore.”

  “Persey’s a bookworm,” Nick said.

  “What do you like to read, Persey?”

  “All kinds of things.” The last book she had read, Persey said, was I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb. Pretty ambitious for a teenager, Deirdre thought.

  Nick said, “She likes Oprah books.”

  “Not just,” Persey said, blushing.

  “If you want to,” Deirdre told her, “you can go downstairs, switch on the lights and look at the books. Pick out something you want. On the house.”

  “To keep?” Persey asked hopefully.

  “To keep.”

  “Don’t get anything out of order,” Nick said as his daughter made for the stairs, her tear-away pants brushing the kitchen door, her ridiculous disco heels knocking the floorboards.

  Deirdre poured tea for herself and Nick. She sat across the table from him trying to smile but wanting, obscurely, to cry. Was it just because this meeting with Nick had made her feel so fucking old? So old, now, that there was no disguising it? In the commune days—the days when five unmarried young persons sharing a downtown apartment could pronounce themselves a “commune,” as if the French Revolution had broken out—Nick had been twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five; Deirdre had been nine years older. Even then, they had occasionally called her “Earth Mother,” and it wasn’t always a compliment. On the other hand, because everybody was sleeping with everybody else, no one wanted to push the maternal metaphor too far.

  Yes, she had slept with Nick. It had been quite passionate for a few months. Now, by some silent mutual agreement, neither of them would mention it.

  “She seems real nice,” Deirdre said, meaning Persey.

  “A little outspoken,” Nick said, “at least since her mom remarried. She spends a month out of every year with Patrice and Joseph in Ann Arbor, getting spoiled rotten.”

  “No, she seems great. And literate, which is kind of a rarity.”

  “I found her reading a Tom Clancy novel last week. I thought, where have I failed?”

  “Bullshit. You’re proud of her.”

  “From time to time.”

  “You should be.”

  And they talked about Patrice and Annie and Carl and the rest of that crowd, how they were doing and where they were, until they had exhausted the shortlist of mutual acquaintances and there was nothing left to say. Deirdre began to feel weirdly superior to Nick, as if in her poverty she had retained some authenticity he had lost. Still, that made him one of the last of the good ones, broad-minded enough to be bashful about his own success. Nowadays, when you outperformed an old friend, you were supposed to make a notch in your gunstock or some damn thing.

  A slice of summer moonlight found its way into the alley behind the shop, her kitchen window. Persey remained downstairs, rummaging and reading. Deirdre felt mischievous. “So,” she said, “you want to share a joint?”

  Nick grinned—a ghost of the old Nick inhabiting his face. “Still smoking, Deirdre?”

  “Off and on. You?”

  “Not for years. But it’s only a joint, right? What the hell.”

  She had rolled one for herself last night and left it in a kitchen drawer. She took it out. “The kids Persey’s age,” she said, “it’s all, what, Ecstasy? GHB?”

  “All I know is what I read in the papers. Lots of drugs, but it sounds like frat-party shit to me. Nothing profound about it.”

  “Whereas we….” Deirdre teased.

  “We were on a spiritual quest.”

  They both laughed. But the irony wasn’t lost on Deirdre. She was laughing at herself. Nick, like most people of her class and generation, had put away the Tibetan Book of the Dead, donated Zen and the A
rt of Motorcycle Maintenance to the yard sale, filled the empty shelf space with Windows guidebooks and Listening to Prozac. Only Deirdre had gone on questing after the fabled enlightenment… but no, not that, not the usual discount guru bullshit; something else; something strange, elusive, unworldly.

  Nick took the joint to the open window so the warm July breeze would draw away the smoke. Persey might come back upstairs at any moment. “We used to hide this from our parents,” he said. “Now we hide it from our kids.”

  “As a rule,” Deirdre said, “I don’t hide it.”

  Nick inhaled cautiously but deeply. A plume of white smoke rose past the hanging dream-catcher and out into the wide world. “Tastes peculiar.”

  “It’s one of the new strains. Some hybrid Dutch Indica, supposedly.”

  “Whoa,” he said. “Enough of that. I have to drive.”

  Deirdre took the joint from him, and for one pellucid moment she was aware of his uneasiness, the way he avoided her eyes.

  He was uncomfortable with what she had become, what he had once felt about her.

  She thought, I embarrass him.

  Fresh pain coiled in her belly.

  Persephone surprised Deirdre by coming upstairs with a recent book about Martian nanofossils, the hints of ancient life lately discovered in an Antarctic meteorite. “Persey sees herself as a biologist,” Nick said. Not wants to be but sees herself as, trivializing the ambition. Persey winced faintly and shot her father a look. It was the first hint of family discord Deirdre had seen, evidence perhaps of some deeper, buried rift.

  “Smart choice,” Deirdre said. “Everything is… you know… older than it seems.” Which meant what? The pain was distracting her.

  She ushered Nick and Persephone to the door, told Nick how great it was to see him, told him not to be a stranger, told Persey it was really nice meeting her. When they were gone the store seemed suddenly cavernous. She locked up front and back and retired upstairs, taking the steps slowly because she hurt again. Hurt worse than before. She rummaged through the bathroom cabinet until she found the old bottle of Percodan left over from her gallbladder operation. She popped one, then two, then—for insurance—a third.

  And so to bed.

  The pain woke her sometime in the quiet hours before dawn. She came out of a claustrophobic dream nauseated with pain and vaguely aware that the mattress under her thighs was slick and warm. My period, she thought vaguely, but it had been years since her last menstrual flow. She groped for the switch on the lamp beside her bed, threw back the bedsheet and saw blood.

  Then more pain, cruel hot blades of it. She bit back a cry and hunched to the bathroom, where she ate four more Percodan and promptly fell to the floor, weak with shock. The blood between her legs was only a trickle, but the pain… the pain rose in a great swelling crescendo, and this time she screamed, and the pain clamped her peritoneal muscles impossibly tight, and her legs arched, and she delivered something.…

  Something she didn’t want to see.

  She wanted to sleep. To faint. To die. But she didn’t. Already the pain had begun to abate; and without looking at the thing on the tiled floor she was able to raise herself up, strip off her soiled nightgown, wad some toilet paper between her legs to serve as a pad. She was dizzy, confused. Should she call 911? Probably—almost certainly—she should, but she didn’t want to, couldn’t face the humiliation of an army of helpful paramedics, would rather die, if she must, though the bleeding had stopped short of outright hemhorrhage. She could see a doctor in the morning, after she cleaned up, after she came to terms with this awful thing, this midnight delivery of, of what? A blood clot, a tumor? She let her eyes creep toward the dark mass on the floor.

  She could not have been pregnant, unless it was some weird parthenogenic pregnancy, so this blood-drenched mass must be a token of disease, probably something advanced and eventually deadly, like the ovarian cancer that had killed her mother forty years ago. God, she thought, look at it. In her mind’s eye she had pictured some mutant abortion, some crudely human cut of meat, but the reality was in fact much less disgusting. The lump was about the size and shape of a lemon, and under the skein of adhesive blood it looked white, shiny white, white as a button.

  As if, Deirdre thought wildly, I had fucked an elephant tusk and delivered a cue ball.

  “Sick,” she muttered to herself.

  She touched the mass with her toe. It was heavy. It rolled to one side. It made a clinking sound against the ceramic tile.

  “Oh,” she said out loud, “oh, this is too much. Too much.”

  She washed her hands. She dampened a washcloth and dabbed the blood off her thighs, her legs, the bathroom floor. At last—tentatively, cautiously—she bent over the tumorous white lump, picked it up and dropped it into the sink under the rushing warm water. Blood swirled into the basin and down the drain. She ran the water until the water ran red, then pink, then clean. The glittering white object sat in the rusty basin like a river rock. She had collected such rocks when she was little. Rocks worn smooth by water. Warmed by sunlight. The Percodan was kicking in.

  The Percodan was kicking in big time, and Deirdre stumbled back to her bed. She retained barely enough presence of mind to peel away the stained sheets, not enough to redress the bare mattress. She simply fell onto it. Her eyes registered the first light of dawn past the window blind. She closed her eyes and made it dark again.

  The secondhand bookstore Deirdre had inherited was called Finders, and the name had proved apt: she was always finding peculiar things.

  Prior to moving in she had gone through the store and the apartment above it meticulously, exorcising the shade of Oscar Ziegler. Nice of the old man to drop this fossilized property in her lap, but she had, to tell the truth, never liked him. Not that he was hostile or angry; he had been too frail for that. But he radiated an old strangeness she might once have called “bad magic,” a contagious atmosphere of bleak resignation. So she had rented a van and trucked his stuff to the Goodwill drop-off, his ridiculous smoking jackets, his 78-rpm platters featuring Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba, his dozen matching copies of the crank book You Will Never Die. His jar of nineteenth-century Austrian coins. His Quaker quilt bedspread with hex signs woven into the pattern, yellow-stained. His perforated Oxford shoes and matching shoe trees. His silver-handled shaving brush and straight razor. His rack of tarry, stinking meerschaums.

  Some of this kibble might have been worth money, but Deirdre didn’t care. The point was to get it out, to replace it with something clean, something new.

  And still, a year later, evidence of Oscar Ziegler surfaced from time to time. From a cupboard long ago obstructed by bookcases: a rude wooden chess board, a child’s tattered cloth jacket with a copy of The Time Machine and Other Stories jammed into one pocket, a litter of strange glass needles of various colors.

  She had found the subcellar just six months ago. The entrance was a hinged wooden door so obscured with dust that she had mistaken it for part of the basement wall. A narrow flight of stairs led down to an earthen-floored space roughly seven feet high by fifteen wide. The room contained nothing but a rotted wooden shelf on which resided six sealed mason jars wrapped in dust as white as spider silk. One of the jars was labeled APPLE CHUTNEY OCT 3 ′99 in crabbed fountain-pen script. One hundred years of chutney. She threw the jars away.

  A week later she braced the subcellar stairs, laid down a crude plank flooring, whitewashed the walls, and installed a grow light. She germinated a batch of British Columbia pot seeds (“Shiva Shanti X Northern Lights,” according to the mail-order ad) and transplanted them to fifteen-liter ice-cream buckets filled with potting soil, vermiculite, and shrimp compost. She installed a fan to circulate the air and she tended the plants three evenings a week. It had been a good crop. No whiteflies, no fungus gnats. The female buds had looked a little strange, gnarled and golden, as if she had overfertilized, but otherwise healthy and sticky with resin glands.

  She had dried her first harves
t carefully and stored the buds in a fresh set of mason jars. She resisted the temptation to make her own labels: BC ORGANIC INDICA AUG ’02.

  Deirdre recovered quickly from the strange birth.

  She stayed in bed for a day, didn’t eat, only limped to the kitchen for tall glasses of ice water. Finders was closed for the duration and that was okay with Deirdre. She felt no pain now, just a subsiding ache that was almost pleasant, a healing ache, she chose to think.

  The next day she was up on her feet with a single Percodan and thinking more clearly.

  She decided not to see a doctor. This was not the advice she would have given anyone else. But it felt right. Right for her, anyway. If the thing she had delivered was a tumor, then it was either benign or malignant. If malignant, it had surely already planted its seeds throughout her body. If benign, no problem.

  But of course it wasn’t a tumor. She had never heard of a tumor as white and hard as that. And if it wasn’t a tumor, then it was a mystery. Bless me, Deirdre thought, I have made a pearl from a grain of sand.

  She retrieved the thing from the bathroom sink, fighting her queasiness. But it was pleasant to the touch. It was warm, it was heavy, and it was as smooth as if it had been polished. It reflected the daylight from the window blinds in a bright miniature rectangle. If she looked at it closely she saw her own long-nosed reflection, just the way she used to see her reflection in Christmas-tree balls when she was a child.

  Well, she thought, didn’t I hunt this all my life, this strangeness? Wasn’t it what she had looked for in blotter hits of LSD and in the collected works of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, in Vedanta Buddhism and in that fucking brown rice diet that had nearly killed her? People talked about “enlightenment,” but “enlightenment” was the wrong word. Really, it was the limits of the material world she had been hunting. The borders of reality, the place where is met might be.