The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The whites of her eyes were clear, the pupils crisp dark nuclei. “Yes.”

  “Do you want a new job? Just for a day?”

  She frowned. “What job?”

  “Wash floors for Taglieri. Clean up, cook him a meal. Just for a day.”

  Just for a day.

  “That’s all?” Rachel asked.

  “That’s all. But you know Taglieri. If he tries to take advantage of you, you come home. If he tries to hurt you, you come home. Do you understand, Rachel?”

  She nodded passively.

  “Jacob,” she said. “I’m sorry I lost the factory job.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “about—about—” And waved her hand. Everything.

  “Do you feel better tonight?”

  “I feel all right.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to Taglieri’s. If you feel well enough, I mean. I’ll go with you.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He has a cat.”

  “Yes. Brivio. Try to sleep, Rachel.”

  Jacob crept away. He felt flooded with shame.

  But if Taglieri touched her the wrong way, Jacob would kill him. The thought helped assuage his guilt. He lay in bed, hoping he could make Taglieri understand the terms of the bargain.

  His mind was racing and he couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes he thought of the overdue rent, or Rachel and the Italian, or the crystalline forest beyond Oscar Ziegler’s door.

  Better to think of chess. He played chess in his mind, working out an opening Ziegler had showed him, but he couldn’t stop thinking of the “wrapped” board and the subtle grammar of its topology, of “The Time Machine” and “The Door in the Wall,” of what a chess game might look like as a four-dimensional object. He spiraled at last down these odd alleys into sleep.

  The indistinct shape moving in the refracted shade of the trees came closer to him. (You were drawn here, Ziegler had said.)

  Bolder now that he was here alone, Jacob let the thing approach him. From a distance it had looked as insubstantial as a winter breath. Closer, it took on a hazy substance, a human form.

  It looked like Rachel.

  Its face was like Rachel’s—a reflection of Rachel in a mirror of fog—but smooth, young, not at all careworn. The apparition was naked but moved with the simple shamelessness of a child. Jacob felt the creature’s gentle interest in him. He smiled, and the sister-thing returned his smile. It moved its mouth as if to speak, but Jacob heard no sound. He let the apparition walk around him, inspecting him, and the impression he took from its motion was a mixture of uneasiness and great patience.

  The buzzing of the faraway insects surrounded him like a child’s gentle murmur. Jacob felt no ill will from the ghost and he let it linger. He thought of Rachel as she had been before her madness—as spritely as this shadow of her.

  The memory comforted him even when the dream faded and he woke.

  The Italian counted out five dollars as Rachel stood with her head bowed in the shadows outside Taglieri’s cheap room.

  “You don’t touch her,” Jacob whispered into Taglieri’s gnarled ear. “Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” Taglieri said. “I’m not an animal.” He put his huge hands on Rachel’s shoulders. She flinched away. Taglieri held on. “Come in, Rachel. Let me look at you.”

  Oscar Ziegler beamed with pleasure as Jacob entered the store. He reached for the chessboard, but Jacob said, “No. First we talk.”

  He took off his coat.

  The dream about Rachel had unsettled him. Jacob told Ziegler bluntly about his chess trances, his hallucination at the store, his doubts about his own sanity. Ziegler astonished him by saying, “But of course you were there! I told you, Jacob, you’re one of the rare ones. Did you really imagine it was a hallucination?”

  Jacob had to sit down. “But if it wasn’t—”

  “Yes, yes. Spare me your incredulity. I should have thought it would be more astonishing if you had discovered the world didn’t have a back-of or an inside. Don’t be small-minded.”

  He felt dizzy. “You said it was the afterlife.”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “But it’s a forest.”

  “There are as many afterlives as there are caverns in the earth, and each one is a unique ecology, godless and strange. As above, so below.”

  Jacob ignored the unfamiliar word, ecology. “I dreamed Rachel was there.”

  “So she is, and you found your way to her very efficiently.”

  “But she’s still alive.”

  “I explained this, Jacob. People don’t always die all at once. Sometimes they die little by little, inch by inch. The part of Rachel that lives in the forest is the part of her that was eaten by her madness.” Ziegler added, “Neither part of her is whole, at the moment.”

  And Jacob struggled with this idea, that Rachel had been dying by fractions for much of her life, that the better part of her was already lost in the chaotic and indefinite paradise Ziegler had shown him.

  It would have been inconceivable if he hadn’t experienced it himself. He said, “I want to go back.”

  “Nothing could be simpler.”

  5.

  At first Jacob couldn’t concentrate on the game, knowing what he knew and anticipating what was to come. But the shopkeeper pressed a sharp attack and Jacob was forced to defend his vulnerable queen.

  When he looked up from the board, the door was open. Golden light drew him out of his chair.

  He felt infinitely more certain of himself than he had the last time he had crossed that threshhold. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to see Rachel: the perfected Rachel who lived among the ruby and golden trees, the Rachel of his childhood.

  He followed Ziegler through the door.

  He wasn’t conscious of the moment when the shopkeeper slipped away from him, no doubt bound on some occult business of his own. Ziegler knew more than he was saying, obviously. More than he was willing to tell Jacob. Ziegler might have been anything … but it was Jacob who had opened the door.

  He stood near the isolated entranceway, briefly worried that he might lose himself in the trackless iridescence. Insects swarmed high overhead, droning like bees in a summer garden. He willed Rachel to come to him, and now she did, emerging from the darkly glittering shadows and smiling at him. She seemed far more solid than she had before. The sunlight, if this pointillistic radiance could be called sunlight, fell on rather than through her. The last time he had seen her she was mute; today, to Jacob’s astonishment, she spoke.

  “Jacob,” she said. “It’s a pretty day.”

  He groped for words. “Aren’t all the days pretty here?”

  “There’s only one day.” She grinned. “We can have a picnic.”

  The absurdity of it charmed him. She might have been ten-year-old Rachel blithely summoning him to the park. She was not really the Rachel he knew, Jacob reminded himself. This was the simple part of her, really a child, the child she had lost inside herself. But that was all right. He had missed the child in Rachel. “All right, a picnic,” he said. “But we don’t have any food.”

  “We don’t need any.”

  He reached for her hand, but his fingers closed on nothing. She was still not a whole, substantial thing. Rachel shrugged at his disappointment and led him with a look.

  The jeweled scarabs on the forest floor scuttled away from her feet.

  He was content, at least for a time, to let questions wait. Rachel led him to a clearing where the chaos of the forest floor gave way to a sort of mosaic of living tiles, hexagonal and octagonal, slate-gray and ochre. It was heartbreaking to watch her kneel on that yielding and lichenous surface pouring imaginary tea into imaginary cups.

  He knelt beside her. “Rachel?”

  “Yes, Jacob?”

  “What do you remember?”

  “A lot. More than I used to.”

 
“Do you remember Mama and Papa?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are they here?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Except for me,” Jacob said.

  “Except for you.”

  “And Mr. Ziegler.”

  She frowned. “Sometimes.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Just shadows.”

  “Aren’t you lonely?”

  “I’ve only been here a day,” Rachel said.

  It was a flexible day, Jacob presumed, like the seven days of creation, which somehow encompassed the Age of Fish and the Age of Reptiles. “Aren’t you cold at night?”

  “There isn’t any night.”

  Disconcerting, this childish obtuseness, almost an unwillingness to understand his questions; but Jacob reminded himself that she was only part of a human being. The better part, surely, but still only part.

  If Rachel died, would Rachel be whole again?

  “Don’t you miss home, Rachel?”

  “I don’t miss anything at all.” She regarded him quizzically. “How did you get here?”

  “Chess,” Jacob said automatically.

  “Oh.” As if it made sense.

  And they passed more time in silence. There was no sign of Ziegler, no sound or motion but the swarming of the rainbow-bright insects above the forest canopy. At length he told Rachel, “You know I can’t stay.” Time had passed on Earth. The other Rachel, the wounded and angry Rachel, might need him—might have fled Taglieri’s room or even fought with him.

  “Play with me before you go,” Rachel demanded regally.

  Jacob nodded and raised an imaginary cup of tea to his lips. “It’s very good,” he said.

  She smiled.

  She began to talk more freely then.

  She reminisced about the Brant Street School and the Settlement House, about the docklands and the shops. She talked about Mama and Papa. Jacob immersed himself in her chatter, knowing that this was why he had come, not to visit Rachel but to revisit her innocence. Despite the strangeness of the surroundings—the shining trees, the pinpoint sun that never left the summer-blue sky—he was unwilling to force an end to the visit.

  After a time they stood and walked. She took him to the brink of a gently rolling hill, and he saw the forest running unbroken to an impossibly far horizon white with radiant light. Every world a growing thing, Ziegler had said. As many afterlives as caverns in the earth. As above, so below.

  A tree had fallen here, a broken universe as opaque as ebony or black pearl. They rested against it where the scarabs had not yet begun to eat. Rachel’s eyes glowed and she seemed more physically present than ever. “I’m sorry, Jacob,” she said.

  “For what? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I’m sorry for all the times I hurt you. Called you names, humiliated you.”

  He reached for her hand. “You remember that, too?”

  Her eyes clouded. “I think … I remember everything now.”

  Jacob touched her hand, and this time there was palpable substance to it. Her hand was cold but he was able to wrap his own fingers around hers.

  But that was wrong.

  She was immaterial, half-present, because (Ziegler had insisted) she was dying by inches, and what died of her on Earth came here.

  What died of her on Earth …

  So cold, her hand.

  He dropped it and backed away.

  “Don’t be frightened,” the Rachel-thing said. “I don’t blame you for what Taglieri did.”

  Then he saw the dark flowering of bruises on her flawless face, the bruises on her neck blue and finger-shaped.

  “Rachel!”

  “I’m sorry if this frightens you. It’s just the way things work. Go home now, Jacob. Try not to grieve.”

  He would have said more, but the gaily colored insects came diving out of the sky as if they had scented her, a shrieking torrent of them.

  They were immense, the size of dray horses. Their bodies were of faceted crystal and their eyes of polished bone. They grasped Rachel in their dangling black arms and carried her aloft as Jacob watched with a scream frozen in his throat.

  He ran, it seemed, forever, through an endless humming noon, until he found the hovering door into Ziegler’s arid bookshop.

  As soon as he stepped across the threshhold everything felt wrong—his body, the weight of himself, the pressure of his feet against the floor.

  He had, like Alice, grown precariously large and thick. The ceiling was too close, his arms were too heavy. His heart beat in his chest with a breathless, faltering rhythm.

  For a long moment he failed to recognize the boy who stood by the chessboard.

  It was the face he had seen in every mirror he had every confronted. It was himself. But the expression of gloating triumph was purely Oscar Ziegler’s.

  “Don’t look so dumbfounded,” the boy-man said. “The topology is simple enough. Like chess, Jacob! Remember? The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.”

  “My sister,” Jacob wheezed from clotted lungs.

  “To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.”

  “Taglieri murdered her.”

  The boy shrugged.

  “You’ve made me old.”

  “Why not? You would only have wasted your youth on her.”

  “Goddamn you,” Jacob said.

  “There’s no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.”

  The boy-thing opened the door and ran out into winter light.

  The sky was blue. The city smelled fetid and alive. Frigid air crackled in his nose, but sunlight warmed the skin of his face. He flexed his arms. Blood flowed in his veins as bracingly as cold creek water.

  It was the world of Steinitz and Anderssen, the world of Puccinni and Verdi and Nellie Melba. The world where night followed day. He had missed it. He ran into its embrace.

  6.

  It maddened him at first, but in time Jacob grew accustomed to the bookstore.

  Its perimeters fit this aging body he had acquired. He explored the rooms upstairs, the cluttered basement, enummerating the contents of his cell, his new possessions. He took his time. He had time enough, he supposed.

  The woman who brought him groceries called him Mr. Ziegler. He grew used to that, too.

  He was polite to customers, both regulars and strangers, because they bore messages: stories, fashions, the smells of spring and summer, from a world he could only glimpse as they opened the door. He had tried to reenter that world, but there was only this single door and beyond it—for Jacob, at least—always the crystalline forest, the hovering swarms of insects.

  He locked Ziegler’s chessboard in a closet. He tried not to think about it. It was one of those things Jacob couldn’t allow himself to dwell on, like the loss of Rachel, or the fate of Taglieri or of the body Ziegler had stolen. Questions better left unanswered. He passed the empty time by reading books, of which there were many, and his only fear was that somewhere in this mass of literature he might discover the secret Oscar Ziegler had withheld from him—that he would see the disposition of all the chess pieces of the universe, and then the door to the world would open and some bright-faced young man would enter, and Jacob would smile and ask him to stay for a game, and play cleverly, and feint against the doomed queen, and lift a lost pawn from the board as if it were nothing more than a piece of carven wood.

  THE PERSEIDS

  The divorce was finalized in the spring; I was alone that summer.

  I took an apartment over a roti shop on Bathurst Street in Toronto. My landlords were a pair of ebullient Jamaican immigrants, husband and wife, who charged a reasonable rent and periodically offered to sell me grams of resinous, potent ganja. The shop closed at nine, but most summer nights the couple joined friends on a patio off the alle
y behind the store, and the sound of music and patois, cadences smooth as river pebbles, would drift up through my kitchen window. The apartment was a living room facing the street, a bedroom and kitchen at the rear; wooden floors and plaster ceilings with rusting metal caps where the gas fixtures had been removed. There was not much natural light, and the smell of goat curry from the kitchen downstairs was sometimes overwhelming. But taken all in all, it suited my means and needs.

  I worked days at a secondhand book shop called Finders, sorting and shelving stock, operating the antiquated cash register, and brewing cups of yerba maté for the owner, an ancient myopic aesthete who subsisted on whatever dribble of profit he squeezed from the business. I was his only employee. It was not the work I had ever imagined myself doing, but such is the fortune of a blithe thirty-something who stumbles into the recession with a B.A. and negligible computer skills. I had inherited a little money from my parents, dead five years ago in a collision with a lumber truck on Vancouver Island; I hoarded the principal and supplemented my income with the interest.

  I was alone and nearly friendless and my free time seemed to stretch to the horizon, as daunting and inviting as a desert highway. One day in the bookshop I opened a copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to the passage where de Quincey talks about his isolation from his fellow students at Manchester Grammar School: “for, whilst liking the society of some amongst them, I also had a deadly liking (perhaps a morbid liking) for solitude.” Me, too, Thomas, I thought. Is it that the Devil finds work for idle hands, or that idle hands seek out the Devil’s work? But I don’t think the Devil had anything to do with it. (Other invisible entities, perhaps.) Alone, de Quincy discovered opium. I discovered Robin Slattery, and the stars.

  We met prosaically enough: she sold me a telescope.

  Amateur astronomy had been my teenage passion. When I lived with my parents on their country property north of Port Moody I had fallen in love with the night sky. City people don’t understand. The city sky is as gray and blank as slate, faintly luminous, like a smoldering trash fire. The few celestial bodies that glisten through the pollution are about as inspiring as beached fish. But travel far enough from the city and you can still see the sky the way our ancestors saw it, as a chasm beyond the end of the world in which the stars move as implacably and unapproachably as the souls of the ancient dead.