The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  From the direction of the bedroom I heard a rustling sound, the sound of leaves in autumn, restless mice, cat’s claws on glass.

  I had reached the state of calm that borders on panic, when thoughts are crisp and weightless and nerves light up like neon tubes. I flipped through the Rolodex again, found Edwin Hubble’s home number and dialed with a trembling finger.

  Grace answered after seven rings. She was in no mood to comfort a frightened teenage girl. Nor would she put her husband on: “This is completely inappropriate, Sandra, and I’msure your uncle would agree,” and I was about to give up and run, just run, when Hubble’s deep voice displaced hers: “Sandra? What’s wrong?”

  Suddenly it seemed possible the whole thing had been a humiliating mistake. I had dreamed the monster in the kitchen. And even if not, what could I tell the stern and unforgiving Edwin Hubble, how could I enlist his sympathy for what he would almost certainly consider an adolescent fantasy?

  But I needed someone in the house. Above all else, that.

  I mumbled something about my uncle being away and “there’s something wrong here, and I’msorry, but I don’t know what to do, and there’s no one else I can call!”

  “What sort of problem?”

  Big silence. I listened for monsters. “It’s hard to explain.”

  I think he heard in my voice what Carter hadn’t: the sweaty tremolo of fear.

  Miraculously, he said he’d be right over. (I heard Grace protesting in the background.)

  “Thank you,” I said.

  And put down the phone reluctantly. No voice now but my own. The house all echos and shadows and stubborn clocks.

  I was in a frenzy of embarrassment when, some twenty minutes later, Hubble’s big Ford pulled into the driveway. The kitchen was empty: I asked Hubble to look, and then I looked myself.

  We didn’t talk about what I thought I had seen, or if we did it was only in the most indirect, delicate way. He seemed to know without being told. I wondered if Carter had already briefed him on “my problem.”

  He cased the house, and then we sat at opposite ends of my uncle’s long living room sofa. I asked him whether he was ever scared, perched in his supernaturally powerful telescope at the top of a mountain and staring into the bottomless deeps of space.

  He smiled. “You know, Edith Sitwell once asked me the same thing. I was showing her some photographic plates. Galaxies millions of light-years distant. It terrified her. The immensity of it. To be such a mote, less than dust among the stars. To see oneself from that perspective.”

  I had no idea who Edith Sitwell was. (An English writer; she had been in Hollywood to consult on a script about Anne Boleyn.) “What did you tell her?”

  “That it’s only terrifying at first. After a time you learn to take comfort from it. If we’re nothing, then there’s nothing to be frightened of. The stars are indifferent.”

  The words were not especially soothing, but his presence was. Even at the end of his life, Hubble was still the former athlete, six-foot-two, almost two hundred pounds. A guardian, powerful and benign. I wondered why he had come so willingly. He was supposed to despise children and he had little sympathy for weakness.

  I wonder now if he was suddenly conscious of his own mortality. He must have known he was nearing the end of his life. This visit might have been the random kindness of a dying man. Or maybe he just missed late nights, mysteries, the hours before sunrise. Maybe he’d been away from the telescope for too long.

  Certainly he remembered what it was like to be alone and afraid. He told me about a summer job heapos;d held when he was seventeen (“Only three years older than you!”), working with a survey crew in northern Wisconsin, trekking into what was then a virgin forest. He talked about the campfires and canvas tents and sextants and the way the sky opened like a book in the silence of the great woods. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “I saw things….”

  “What kind of things?”

  But he wouldn’t say. He changed the subject. “Time for bed,” he told me. “Past time.”

  “But you’ll be here?”

  “I’ll be here. It won’t be the first dawn I’ve seen, you know, Sandra.”

  I slept while Edwin Hubble kept watch for me.

  I slept in the dark, and woke to a harsh and terrible light.

  The palace of light.

  Should I call it a flying saucer? An unidentified object? I don’t know if it’s either of those things; I’ve never seen it objectively, as a sky-ship, a vehicle, though there have been accounts (and I do recognize the details) in which people describe it that way. Still, the words trivialize the experience. Was I taken up into a “flying saucer”? Surely not; surely it wasn’t one of those silver-domed art-deco totems from the cover of Fate magazine.

  No, it was … the palace of light.

  The palace of light.

  I was taken up through the beams and tiles of the house, lifted above the roof in a slow delirium of terror, and then I was in the palace of light. I had been here before, but every visit is as fresh and terrifying as the first. The light was soulless, sullen, and everywhere at once. It hurt my eyes. They gathered around me, a dozen or more; they turned their sad and quizzical eyes on me, queried my body with probes and syringes of solid light.

  The ordeal was endless, worse because there seemed to be no malevolence in it, only a bland curiosity. And of course the sadness. I wondered: Why don’t they weep?

  This time, though, the experience was different. My body was paralyzed, my eyes were not, and when I looked to my left I was astonished to see Edwin Hubble next to me on a pedestal of shadows, equally helpless, equally bound and paralyzed. But his eyes were open.

  I remember that. His eyes were wide open, and he seemed … not afraid.

  He seemed almost at home with these creatures, with their sadness and their curiosity.

  But I was not. I closed my eyes and prayed for dawn, begged for unconsciousness, begged for a door back into my daylight life.

  When I woke, Edwin Hubble had gone.

  What woke me was the sound of the front door. It was Carter, home from the night’s revels. The window was full of sunshine and fresh with the smell of jasmine and acacia and a few warm ions from the distant sea.

  I spent the day in a frenzy of apprehension. Hubble would say something to Carter, lodge a complaint; I would be disgraced, humiliated, sent home to another round of psychiatric torture.

  But I don’t think Carter ever found out Hubble had visited that night; or if he did, he was too ashamed to make an issue of it. He was the one who had been AWOL, after all. I was only a child.

  But I don’t think he knew. When he came home from Palomar the next day he was as incommunicative as ever.

  And I was, as ever, frightened of the dark….

  But here is the strange fact: they didn’t come back.

  Not that night, or the night after, or any other night in California or in the decades since.

  (Except lately….)

  They didn’t come back. I had lost them, somehow. I had learned to evade them.

  I had learned not to let my eyes turn inside out.

  I didn’t see Edwin Hubble again that summer—not until the last day (the last hour, in fact) of my visit.

  It was a Saturday, end of August. Uncle Carter drove me to the airport. I sat in the passenger seat of the car whispering a silent good-bye to the dwarf palms and the tindery hills and the bobbing duck-billed oil rigs. We arrived at the terminal half an hour early.

  I was astonished—though less astonished, I think, than Carter—when Edwin Hubble met us at the luggage check-in, gave us a wide grin, and steered us into the lunch counter while we waited for my flight to be called.

  Hubble said he hoped I had enjoyed my stay and my visit to the Hale Observatory. Pleasantries all around, but there wasn’t really much to say or time to say it. At last my bewildered uncle excused himself and lined up for a second cup of coffee.

  And I sat at the table with
the famous astronomer.

  He touched his finger to his lips: I was not to speak.

  “If you look into the uncreated world,” he said quietly, “it looks back at you. Maybe you think, why me? How did they find me? But it’s a mirror world, Sandra. Maybe they didn’t find you. Maybe you found them.”

  “But—!”

  “Shh. It isn’t wise to speak about this. You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you’re afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you’re like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.”

  My uncle was heading back to the table, too soon, with tepid black coffee in a waxed-paper cup.

  Suddenly I wanted to cry. “I don’t understand!”

  Hubble touched his lips again. He was solemn. “One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.”

  Carter stood beside the table glancing between the old astronomer and myself. “They’re calling your flight,” he said. “Did I miss something?”

  Edwin Hubble died that autumn, still making plans for the Hale Observatory, still probing the limits and implications of the red shift. He suffered a fatal heart attack at the end of September—the twenty-seventh, if I recall correctly. He had been on the mountain for the first time in many weeks, making long photographic exposures of NGC 520, and he was looking forward to another run. I cried when I heard the news.

  My uncle continued his career in astronomy, eventually left Palomar for a tenured position at Cal Tech. He died, too, prematurely, halfway through Reagan’s second term.

  George Adamski, who owned the diner up the mountain, went on to publish several accounts of gaudy flying-saucer jaunts around the solar system. Crank books, clearly, though I sometimes wonder what prompted his change of career.

  Aldous Huxley, whom I had met briefly at my uncle’s party, experimented with mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, his own inquiry into what he called “the antipodes of the mind.” His book dwells at length on light, the quality of light, the intensity of light. He died of throat cancer on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

  And I went back to Toronto, finished school, left home, married a petroleum chemist, raised two children, and nursed my beloved husband through his own long struggle with cancer.

  I live alone now, in a world 1953 might not recognize as its linear descendant. The multiethnic, information-intensive, post-industrial present day. The Great Metrollopis of the World. The world is full of frightening things.

  But I am not afraid to look at what I see.

  Lately they have come back.

  They have come back, or, Hubble might say, I have gone back to them.

  There is no explanation. They are the perennially anticlimactic, the ever-unknown. The world expands, or I am shrinking, and sometimes my less than 20/20 vision turns inside out, and in the long nights I see them moving through the walls. I have even visited the palace of light, and the palace of light is as terrible and enigmatic as ever.

  And they are as sad as ever, their eyes more poignant than I remembered, but—is it possible?—they seem, in their alien fashion, somehow pleased with me.

  Pleased, I think, because I’mnot afraid of them anymore.

  I look, in order to understand. The understanding is elusive, but I suppose it will come, perhaps at the moment I reach the final dwindling point, the event-horizon of my own life, when the universe expands to infinity … and will they be there?

  Waiting?

  I don’t know. I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

  PROTOCOLS OF CONSUMPTION

  The question, now as always: Do I belong here?

  F-wing invites doubt. You’re never quite alone in F-wing, but it’s not a place anyone actually belongs. There are no waiting rooms in F-wing, just these barely upholstered chairs scattered along the hallway. Not much in the way of magazines, either. I’d learned to buy my own at the hospital gift shop. Time, Newsweek: barricades of choice for the antisocial outpatient. But when I saw Mikey Winston barrelling toward me with all the blind momentum of a runaway tractor-trailor, I knew with that no mere magazine would daunt him.

  I didn’t know his name at that point. He was only vaguely familiar, a face I’d seen somewhere, not here. Mikey waddled along the corridor in a striped T-shirt that didn’t quite meet the waist of his thrift-shop trousers, trouser cuffs turned up over tattered low-top Nikes. Fixed grin, pig-narrow eyes, a high forehead merging into black hair that ran in strings to his dandruff-dusted shoulders. Gray teeth, not a complete set. He found the chair next to me.

  “Meds?” he asked.

  I put down Time. “Pardon me?”

  His voice had the penetrating power of a veterinary syringe. “You’re here for Dr. Koate, right? Tuesday group, right? New guy?”

  All those things, Heaven help me.

  “So,” he said, “what meds are you on?”

  I wasn’t prepared for this frontal assault. I made the mistake of answering him. “Lithium,” I admitted.

  “Just lithium?”

  Yeah, just. Babe in the woods, me.

  “So you’re, uh, bipolar?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s nothing much. That’s no big deal. I’ve done Librium, Elavil, Prozac, Paxil…a couple of anxiolytics for a while…Tofranil for years, but I hated it. Made me sweat. Now I’m on the new one.”

  “The new one?”

  “Thallin. You gotta know about that. New one. Hey, I recognize you,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah. What’s your name?”

  “Zale,” I said. “Bob Zale.”

  “Zeal. Laze.”

  “What?”

  “Anagrams. Zale. Mix up the letters, you know, like the Jumble cartoon in the newspaper. You’re on the mailbox!”

  “Mailbox?”

  “In the lobby. We live in the same building. That’s where I saw you.”

  Come to think of it, that was where I’d seen Mikey: a gnome on the stairway, forging his way through drifts of cigarette butts to the lobby mailbox. I live in a four-story brick apartment building on a busy street near Sunnybrook Hospital, the sort of building that houses single mothers, immigrants working night shifts, recluses, marginal cases of all sorts. My new fraternity.

  Mikey introduced himself. “I’m at the other end of the basement! B-13! We’re neighbors!”

  I was less than overjoyed.

  Dr. Koate thought group would be good for me, so I was invited to her biweekly 10 A.M. with a half dozen of the walking wounded. I won’t dwell on this. Suffice to say that I was introduced to Estelle, of the Thorazine twitch and raw-chewed fingers; Mikey, obsessive-compulsive and subject to schizophrenic interludes; Daniel, who had been arrested while masturbating during the New Year’s Eve celebration at Nathan Philips Square, which must have been a chilly exercise; Kip, a reformed heroin addict and incompletely reformed paranoid, age eighteen; and two other women so pathologically withdrawn that I never did learn their names.

  Dr. Elizabeth Koate sat in the midst of this zoo, her smile as unflagging as her blouse was neatly pressed. No lab coats in F-wing. We’re all just folks here. Actually, I admired Dr. Koate’s unshakable calm, her lucid and benevolent presence. I often wondered what it cost her, in emotional terms. Did she go home at night and bite the cat?

  She introduced me to the group, or rather encouraged me to introduce myself. I ran down the salient facts. Thirty years old, newly single, ex-electrical-engineer (ex-several-things by now), suffering a bipolar “mood disorder,” as I’ve been encouraged to think of it, probably since adolescence but only lately diagno
sed.

  Estelle, the finger-chewer, asked what had finally brought me to therapy.

  Every human instinct resists these confessions. Anyway, it was a tricky question. Where do you start? The money wasted senselessly, the suicidal impulses, the drinking binges, the failed marriage?

  “My daughter,” I said finally.

  Dr. Koate gave me a meaningful and gently interested look. “Your daughter told you to go into therapy?”

  “No. I went into therapy when I figured out that my daughter was afraid of me.”

  No further questions.

  Dr. Koate asked Mikey how he was responding to his meds. He glowed at the attention. Six months on Thallin, our Mikey, and liking it. “It’s not heavy. It doesn’t load down the body. Less pushy than Prozac, and I’m not sleepy all the time.”

  And so around the circle. Prozac, Limbitrol, Elavil, Triavil; Thallin, Thallin, Thallin. I felt like a novice, a parvenu, with my simple chemical salt, though the list of potential side-effects appended to the small brown bottle of Lithotabs has a nicely ominous ring: dry mouth, blurred vision, loss of coordination; in a worst-case scenario, blackouts, blurred speech, seizures, coma.

  We psychonauts expect these hazards. They are the tigers in our jungle, the anacondas of our private Amazon.

  Naturally, Mikey didn’t drive. Naturally, he begged a ride with me. Rain came down in torrents, glazing the Sunnybrook parking lot and making even a polite refusal impossible.

  Mikey nestled into the passenger seat, exuding his own odd chem-lab smell. Nervous at first, he entertained me by rearranging the letters on the traffic signs. (“Pots! Texi!”) Then, a gambit on my part, we talked about the apartment building. I thought of it as an affordable rat hole. Mikey claimed to like living there.

  “Basement at the back,” he said, “not bad, close to the laundry room, storage, not bad. Close to the furnace. Warm in winter. Not bad at all.”

  “The bugs don’t bother you?”

  “Bugs?”

  “The ants.”

  “Oh, ants. Well, you know, ants—I don’t mind ’em.”