The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The building was a unique property. The problem wasn’t cockroaches, though I had found one or two prospecting the bathroom walls, but ants. They boiled up from under the basement floorboards, ignored all propriety, invaded shoes, clothing, sleeping bodies. I had reached a kind of armed truce by way of liberal applications of Crack ’n Crevice Raid, which was probably contaminating my food and causing my testicles to shrink. I told Mikey Pd complained to the superintendent. Mikey was unexpectedly upset.

  “Mr. Saffka, Mr. Saffka, he won’t do anything. Maybe put down more roach powder in the halls. Make life difficult. Did you have to complain?”

  “Yeah, I think I did.”

  “Make life more difficult. I’ll talk to them.”

  “Who, the ants?”

  But Mikey didn’t answer.

  My ex-wife, Corinna, had been granted custody of my daughter, Emily in the divorce settlement. I hadn’t contested the issue. I trusted Corinna, I didn’t trust myself, and in any event I knew what the courts would make of a male parent with bad debts and a psychiatric condition.

  I told Mikey good-bye and retreated to my own apartment—a “bachelor” apartment, or more accurately a closet with a toilet. There was e-mail from Em. Bless the Internet for letting me exchange these semaphores with my daughter, ions darting between two synapses in the World Brain. Em, twelve years old, had mastered the electronic mysteries. Her note was chatty and peppered with happy-face emoticons.

  Her class had gone on a field trip to the Humber River Valley—one of those glorious late-May rock-turning expeditions, I gathered. Many and various were the small things that lived in the pitch-black riverside muck: water striders, mayflies, eggs and larvae and protozoa. Em was excited because she’d found a rock with the image of a trilobyte frozen in it. “It is even older than you, Dad!:-)”

  The river of time, I told her in a return note, is the oldest river of all, rich with life. Em was my contribution to that river, my own ripple in the stream: I the sinking stone, Em the perfect golden wave shimmering in the sunlight.

  (Dr. Koate calls this kind of thinking “fatalistic” and wants me to avoid it.)

  We arranged to meet on the weekend, brunch at McDonald’s and maybe a movie in the afternoon. Saturday was my regular day with Em. Lately she had stopped cringing at the sight of me, and for that thank Lithium, thank Dr. Koate, thank even Biweekly Group.

  Which left only the evening to kill. Bless television, while we’re counting our blessings. Television talks to you when there’s no human voice but your own, when your own voice is an abusive whine that hums in your head like a dynamo. God bless lithium and Raid and cable TV, and God bless me, if I should wake before I die.

  I work four days a week at a downtown used-book shop, shelving and stocking and making sales for the obese owner, who lives upstairs with his collection of brocaded smoking jackets and his Oscar Wilde first editions. His last employee had gone mad or fled to the wilds of British Columbia, depending on which version of the story he chose to tell. Either scenario had begun to seem plausible.

  Holding a job means keeping regular hours, unfortunately. Mikey learned when to look for me in the building’s tiny lobby. Usually I could forestall his hints and invitations with a wave or a complaint about how busy I was, perhaps the world’s most pathetic lie. But Mikey had the doggedness of a true obsessive-compulsive.

  I came home Thursday too tired to fend him off and accepted the offer of coffee at his apartment. “Good!” he exclaimed. “Hey, fine! Roll out the red carpet!”

  Mikey may or may not have been capable of sarcasm—I’ve never been sure.

  He turned the key in his lock—he had locked his apartment even for a stroll down the corridor—with all the pomp and circumstance of a bank president cracking a vault. A peculiar odor wafted out as he opened the door, the acrid smell of ancient laundry and unaired rooms, but under that a cloying sweetness, as if he had spilled a jar of honey once long ago. I drew a precautionary breath and stepped inside.

  The obsessive-compulsive is doomed to display his mania. Mikey, at least, was an orderly O-C. The floor was naked parquet, the sofa and chair shabby but positioned symmetrically: I was certain the distance to each adjacent wall would match within a millimeter. There were no visible books except for a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in relentless order on a shelf.

  And bugs. Insects, rather. Mikey was an amateur entomologist, or at least a bug collector. The specimens framed and mounted on the walls were nothing exotic, only what you might find on the streets any average summer: June bugs, ladybugs, cicadas; even cockroaches, centipedes, silverfish. Creatures more often scraped off the sole of the shoe than admired under glass.

  But I admired them, or at least pretended to. Mikey, for once, was unresponsive, wouldn’t talk about his collection, just measured coffee by the level teaspoonful into an immaculately washed percolator and whistled nervously to himself. When we sat down on his clean but ragged, ancient sofa all he wanted to talk about was Dr. Koate and the Group.

  Mikey admired Dr. K. “She’s a genius. Good with meds. Best meds of any doctor. You’re still just doing lithium, right?”

  “That’s all I need, Mikey.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” He tapped his shining forehead. “Things hide. It’s a complicated system. Serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine: every brain cell like a gun with a thousand bullets, a thousand fingers on a thousand triggers. Brain cells talk in chemistry, did you know that?” His coffee cup rattled on his trembling knee. “Like insects. Pheromones. Hormones. Chemicals. The same way insects talk. Like in an anthill or a beehive, little chemical messages, it’s the first kind of communication, the most basic.”

  “I’m okay with the lithium.”

  “An elementary salt.”

  “It gets the job done.”

  “Our problem is communication. A little Prozac, a little Thallin, it gets the cells talking. They communicate in new ways. Lithium just, you know, damps things down.”

  This was oppressive, and so was Mikey’s apartment, its junk-store sterility and sealed windows, its dry and overheated air. “I have to go.”

  Mikey took my cup and placed it next to his on the kitchen counter, symmetrically.

  “The whole earth is full of messages,” he said brightly.

  I watched an ant cross the countertop, probing our empty cups for whatever messages we had left there.

  Picking up a daughter from the home of an estranged wife: always a comedy of humiliation.

  Em was playing in the backyard when I arrived. Corinna took me into the kitchen. From the window I could see my daughter rolling her Barbie camper among the tall weeds by the fence.

  “I’d like her back by four-thirty,” Corinna said. “Early supper. And she has a Social Studies project due Monday.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.” The difficult part about being a manic-depressive-in-remission is that one inhabits the ruins of a life. The lens of sanity is merciless. Around Corinna I was reduced to the role of a penitent, sin-stained and humbled and hair-shirted.

  Corinna is a short, compact, dark-haired woman, an accountant for a Bay Street firm, devastatingly good-looking when she isn’t encased in her professional armor. She smiled, a good sign, and asked how I was doing.

  “Even keel,” I said.

  “Still taking the lithium?”

  “I don’t think that’s going to change.”

  “Is it still working for you?”

  “More or less.”

  This was leading up to a confession. “I’ve been getting some counseling myself.” There was a defiant note in her voice, as if she expected me to mock her for the decision. God help me, there might have been I time when I would have. (Seeing people flinch from me has become a mode of recognition, like seeing one’s own face in a mirror.)

  I said, “Does it help?”

  “Well, I think so. I like my shrink. She wants me to consider medication.”

  “Medication?”
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br />   “Just an antidepressant. Prozac, probably, or Thallin. What do you think?”

  I understood that she wanted an opinion from someone already “on meds,” an insider. I said, weakly, “Whatever works for you, Corinna. There’s no guarantee with this sort of thing.”

  “No, I know. It’s just been kind of hard lately, keeping everything together, with Em’s school and all.”

  “Trouble at school?”

  “She won’t sit still. Talks over the teacher. Kid stuff, really, but the school nurse has been using the H-word. Hyperactivity. Or attention-deficit disorder.”

  “Em’s not hyperactive.”

  “You get different manifestations of ADD. At least, that’s what they tell me.”

  “She’s just restless.”

  “She won’t keep quiet in class, apparently.”

  Not my Em, I thought. My Em is a quiet, thoughtful little girl. Occasionally sullen, it’s true, and sometimes moody…or maybe that’s just the effect I have on her.

  She picked up her Barbie camper and shook a dozen ladybugs out the back. They flew off like tourists evicted from a tour bus. Em looked at me brightly. “What movie are we seeing?”

  We saw fames and the Giant Peach at a review theater. Em had seen it on videotape, but she enjoyed the popcorn and the big-screen ambience. She laughed at the right places but seemed thoughtful, afterward, in the car. “Real bugs don’t act like that,” she said. “Well, I mean, of course they don’t, but what they really do is a lot more interesting.”

  The combined physical weight of all the insects on earth, Em said, outweighed all other living things put together. “Think of all that,” she said, “all hidden under the dirt or inside things. All those insects, talking to each other.”

  “They can talk?”

  “To each other,” Em said firmly. “Not like in the movie. They talk with chemicals.”

  The cell phone buzzed. Corinna, asking how we’d liked the movie.

  I said we’d liked it fine.

  “Good. Great. Listen, I know I said I wanted Em back early—”

  “We’re on the way.”

  “Well, would it be okay if you kept her little longer? For the evening, maybe?”

  It took me a moment to work out the implication. “Date, Corinna?”

  “Just a chance to get out of the house. I mean, if it’s all right with you, if you don’t have other plans.”

  “No plans. I’d be happy to spend an evening with Em. When do you want her back?”

  “By ten, say? If I’m not here FU have Natalie put her to bed.”

  “Natalie?”

  “The teenager next door. Baby-sitter. Is ten all right?”

  “Sounds fine.”

  Em was silent, listening.

  Comes a time when coincidence is heaped upon coincidence until the mind screams: Pattern, for Christ’s sake, there’s a pattern here.

  Maybe if I’d reached that point sooner—

  No, that’s bad thinking. Depressive thinking.

  I have to be linear about this. Coherent. Objective.

  I made dinner in my minuscule kitchen, hamburgers and baked potatoes for Em and I. While she waited for the food she cruised cable, finally abandoned the remote control and settled down with a Harry Potter book. Not my idea of hyperactivity, and are ADD kids usually such attentive readers?

  She seemed to enjoy dinner, though she complained about the lack of ketchup. She went to the refrigerator for a Coke, took a glass from the cupboard, paused to inspect the bottle of Lithotabs I’d left on the counter. “Is this your medicine?”

  “Yup.”

  “Looks different from mine.”

  “From yours? What medicine are you taking, pumpkin?”

  “Ritalin. At school. Little round yellow pills.”

  Ritalin is the brand name for methylphenidate, a central nervous system stimulant often prescribed for kids with attention-deficit disorder. Helps the brain cells talk to each other, Mikey would have said. A talk-talk chemical. I was bothered by the idea of someone modifying my daughter’s brain chemistry without my knowledge or permission, perhaps even without Corinna’s. “I guess the school nurse gives you Ritalin?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did she clear this with Mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  I sat at the table and regarded my daughter: her golden hair askew, her nails still dark with backyard dirt because she’d forgotten to wash her hands before dinner.

  “So do you think the Ritalin helps?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She looked at me solemnly. “Can we rent a videotape tonight?”

  Days passed. I quizzed Corinna about the Ritalin and she confessed to signing a permission form. “She takes a minimal dose, and it hasn’t harmed her in any way. Helped, if anything. Her grades are up and her teacher has stopped complaining. If I notice any kind of side effect I’ll take her off it, of course.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I almost did—you know, when you came to pick her up.”

  “But?”

  “But I wasn’t sure how you’d react.”

  “I don’t throw things anymore, Corinna.”

  “Old habits die hard.”

  Hers or mine? My emotional volatility or her conditioned flinch?

  Either way, my fault. One night last year, unemployed, drunk, nearly suicidal, I had come home and demolished the kitchen. I broke bottles, trashed the microwave, threw a full jug of Javex through the French doors. Creating, of course, one of those memories that throbs periodically like an old war wound. Chilling forever any impulse Corinna might have once possessed to confide in me.

  And frightening Em, who had stood in the kitchen doorway twisting her nightgown in her small fists, crying soundlessly.

  I had described the scene to Dr. Koate a few months ago. Dr. Koate listened with barely a furrowing of her thoughtful brow. “Your remorse is appropriate,” she had said. “But you mustn’t let it lock you in place. Apologize and move on.”

  I appreciated Dr. Koate’s advice, but what I really liked about her was her cool receptivity—her implacable, wise smile, as if she were privy to some ancient wisdom of the earth.

  Mikey’s fondness for Thallin began to fade. Coincidentally, upbeat stories about the drug were suddenly everywhere: newspapers, TV. It was the psychiatric miracle Prozac had only hinted at, an antidepressant that was also an anxiolytic and antipsychotic and reducing pill and sleep aid, and safer than salt. Your basic all-round medicine for melancholy.

  But Mikey was backsliding, and that was obvious at the next Tuesday Group. He looked unhealthy and withdrawn. He hadn’t washed his hair in recent memory; his skin was sallow, his teeth the color of weathered ivory. When Dr. Koate asked him how he was doing, he hesitated and then launched into one of his monologues.

  “Whenever they find something new, something powerful, they always think it’s medicine. But they’re wrong.”

  “Who are they, Mikey?”

  “Scientists. Doctors. Did you know, Dr. K., that when they brought back tobacco from the New World lots of Europeans thought it was a medicine? There was a guy invented a machine, he went around pumping tobacco smoke up the rear ends of the crowned heads of Europe. As medicine! That’s a true story, you can look it up. And radium! That guy Kellogg, the corn flake guy, he had a sanatorium back at the turn of the century where he made people inhale radium gas, for a cure! But it’s a force of nature, Christ, radium, it’s atoms decaying, matter turning into energy, radiation, tumors, disease!”

  “That was a long time ago, Mikey.”

  “They poured X rays into people’s feet, just to figure out their shoe size!”

  “Perhaps that’s true, but—”

  “But you think I should talk about me. But I am, Dr. K. This is about me.”

  “In what way, Mikey?”

  He hung his head. “Thallin.”

  “Thallin isn’t radium. It isn’t radioactive.”

  “Not
just Thallin. All those chemicals we dump all the time, dioxin, methporine, you get those frogs in Michigan with two heads or one eye or six legs, you get alligators in Florida with no testicles, you get birds dying out because their eggs are soft as Jell-O. Because there’s no such thing as just a chemical, Dr. K. I read all about this. The planet is talking to itself, the planet has been talking to itself for a million years, and chemicals are the language, and we keep dumping weird messages into the dirt, the rivers—into our own bodies!”

  “Do you think the Thallin is bad for you?”

  “That’s not the problem!”

  “Let’s not shout at each other.”

  “Good, bad, that’s not the problem! The problem is messages, don’t you get it? All these chemicals are fake code, bad letters, words all scrambled up! If you could listen you’d hear trees talking, flowers, insects, they talk in chemicals as complicated as anything you can cook up in a laboratory, but we’re killing their language, and it’s our language, too, the oldest language, body language, and it’s written in dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, estrogen, a million chemicals that don’t even have names!”

  “We could consider a different medication. That might be a good idea.”

  “You’re not listening!”

  “Maybe we should listen to each other, Mikey.”

  “Everything’s talking to everything else, every chemical is a word or a sentence or a book, but what are we saying, Dr. Koate? Nobody knows—that’s what scares me!”

  Dr. Koate let a silence fall, a reverberant and calming silence. Then she spoke. “Mikey has concerns about his medication. Would anyone else like to share some thoughts on this?”

  I left, as politely as possible, ahead of the other outpatients, made my way quickly down the F-wing corridor past the nursing station and the pastel watercolor prints in protective glass, past academic off prints posted on the bulletin board like souvenirs: SSRI Interaction at 5-HTa Receptor Sites, Dopamine Depletion and Renal Function in Chronic Schizophrenia. Past the pharmacy, auditorium, lunch cart, at last into the open air. Into a fine, early-summer noon.