The Perseids and Other Stories (10 page)

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 everything 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.

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. He 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.