The Perseids and Other Stories

Jacob came into the small bookstore to get out of the brutal cold, and because he had an empty hour or two to fill up, and because (not least) he hoped Oscar Ziegler would give him another book.

The door snapped shut on snow and ice. The shop was heated by a modern basement coal furnace, the air perfumed with dust and paper and hot iron. Jacob, sixteen years old and numb inside his inadequate cloth coat, shivered with the particular chill of warming. He felt like an intruder in some exotic desert kingdom.

There were, as he had hoped, no other customers in the store. Oscar Ziegler sat alone behind the cash desk, snug in the heat. Ziegler’s eyeglasses glinted over his fat cheeks when he smiled. “Jacob! You look miserable. Come in, come in, put your coat on the ladder to dry. Take a seat.”

Ziegler, as usual, was hoping for a game of chess. Jacob, as usual, would oblige him. On the street, chess was a way to make money. Here, chess was the price of a book. Actually
buying
a book was out of the question. Every penny Jacob gleaned from his chess wagers and his language lessons served to feed and clothe and shelter himself and his sister Rachel. Books were frivolous. Although he loved them.

Jacob’s father had been a scholar in Europe, a ragman in Canada until he died two years ago. From his father Jacob had learned Yiddish and English, French and Italian, German, even a little
Latin. Jacob had the ear for language, just as he had the head for chess. He taught English to new immigrants and their families for ten cents an hour. He played chess with the old men in the Ward for penny bets. In summer, the chess paid more than the language lessons. In winter, the lessons more than the chess.

He did not discriminate in either chess or language. He had tipped his king to impoverished Russian nobles; he had taught English to the pockmarked Ruthenian boy who lit the Shabbas torches.

The year that had begun (by the Christian calendar) just two weeks ago was 1911. Two prime numbers, Jacob observed, 19 and 11. Add them together, you got 30. The sum of two primes was always an even number—but even the mathematician Fermât had failed to produce a proof of that statement.

Numbers sometimes tormented him, just as demons tormented his sister.

Oscar Ziegler, who owned the bookshop and was its sole employee, lived in the rooms above the shop and was never seen in the street. He was in other ways equally inscrutable. His age, for instance. He was a short and burly man, gray-haired but not much wrinkled. He might have been forty, or sixty, or older. He wore an old-fashioned frock coat and ties that would have been grotesquely colorful if they hadn’t faded to pastel. He seldom talked about himself or his past. His name sounded German to Jacob, but the very faint trace of a European accent in his voice was oddly liquid, almost Catalonian. He loved books and chess and opera, and would talk knowledgeably about Coleridge or Steinitz or Nellie Melba. But when had he ever ventured far enough from his heated cave to hear an opera? He had hired a woman to bring him groceries.

Jacob watched Ziegler set up the chessboard in a clear space on the desk. Jacob took the footstool for a chair. At sixteen, he had still not reached his full height. His shoulders barely reached the rim of the desk. Ziegler’s creaking wooden accountant’s chair became, from this perspective, as magisterial as a throne.

Ziegler put out his clenched fists with a pawn in each. Jacob
touched a pale knuckle of Ziegler’s left hand. Black.

The game was interesting at first. Ziegler worked through the book opening and Jacob arrayed his pieces in a crenellated defense that left him prepared to take advantage of any weakness in his opponent’s position. Briefly, then, he was oblivious to his surroundings, letting the possibilities of the board focus his attention. It was like entering a trance—a
chess trance
, as Jacob thought of it. He watched Ziegler attempting to dig canals in the black defenses but at the same time exposing faults of his own, tiny channels of opportunity down which a single pawn might flow far enough to threaten the ivory king.

Past a certain point—in this case, a pawn sacrifice that put Ziegler’s bishop at the rim of the board—the conclusion was foregone. Ziegler, however, chose to play to the end, smiling placidly as a Buddha at his own losses. Jacob returned a part of his attention to the prosaic reality of the bookshop. He felt drained, pleasantly tired. He wondered if this absolute absorption was how Rachel’s trances felt, though hers were deeper and vastly more traumatic. Rachel sometimes stared into space for an hour or two at a time, her eyes tracking nothing at all. Sometimes she screamed.

“Did you read the book?” Ziegler asked, playing lazily now.

The last book Ziegler had given him was
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
, by H. G. Wells. A volume of strange stories. Jacob had indeed read the book, and enjoyed it immensely, although he had been forced to sell it for twenty-five cents to help make up the December rent. “Yes,” he said.

“Did you find a particular favorite, Jacob?”

He told Ziegler his favorite story had been “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” in which a man’s vision was displaced halfway across the world, so that he could see the Antipodes Islands (or the deeps of the sea) as he stumbled blindly through urban London.

Ziegler smiled at that. “I think I prefer the title story, or ‘The Moth.’ But you’re right, ‘The Remarkable Case’ is excellent. What did you like about it?”

“There was a line in the story. Davidson says, ‘It seems to me
that I see too much.’” It made him think of his sister and her bad spells.

When Rachel was in the grip of her madness she saw and spoke to things and persons no one else could see. There was something almost comforting in the idea that she might only be gazing into the deeps of a distant ocean, reacting with comprehensible fear to the creatures that lived there.

Inevitably, Ziegler’s king succumbed to Jacob’s siege. Almost too much time had passed. Rachel would be home from the factory. She didn’t like to be alone. She wouldn’t eat if Jacob wasn’t there.

Ziegler thanked him for the game and said, “I owe you another book. You like Wells? I have another Wells.
The Time Machine and Other Stories.
Take it with you.”

Jacob accepted the volume and tucked it under his shirt. He pulled his coat around himself and turned to the door, in which was set a rippled windowpane lacquered with ice. Outside, night had fallen.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Come again,” Ziegler said.

Jacob trudged through fresh falling snow along the narrow and torch-lit alleys of that part of the city called the Ward: north from the railway station, west of Yonge Street; east of University (unless you counted all the Macedonians around Eastern Avenue), south of College. Even in the cold, the Ward stank of privy pits and box closets. Shack flats over bare soil fronted the unpaved laneways. The snow had grown in dunes over broken stovepipes and heaps of rags.

The building he called home was hardly more than a shed. It was, by the standards of the Ward, not too bad. Small, narrow, dark, and impossible to heat, but better than the crowded boardinghouses on Elm Street.

He found his sister huddling by the woodstove. Rachel had lit more than a dozen candles and placed them randomly about the room. Bent under her shawl, she looked eighty. She was seventeen, a year older than Jacob himself.

“You’re late,” she said.

He heated a stew of vegetables and fish over the stove and served it in porcelain bowls. Rachel ate less than half of what he gave her. She was listless and silent. Jacob didn’t mind the silence. He knew it wouldn’t last. He used the opportunity to look at the book Ziegler had given him.
But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly
—
why not another direction at right angles to the other three?
—
and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry.
…

Later, she opened the door and walked to the latrine. When fifteen minutes passed and she hadn’t returned, Jacob sighed and went to look for her. He found her squatting in the outhouse with her skirts raked up, snow settling on her thighs like lacework. She shivered, but her eyes were fixed with rapt attention on nothing at all. He covered her and walked her back inside.

“You’re sick, Rachel,” he said. “Settle down.”

She lay on her mattress and buried herself in blankets. “No, I’m not sick.”

“You’re not yourself.”

“I’m the Queen of the Moon, and you can go fuck yourself.”