The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Mikey somehow reached the car ahead of me.

  “Zeal,” he muttered. “Laze.”

  I groaned. “Need a ride, Mikey?”

  “Okay.”

  He filled the car with the stink of his sweat-drenched clothing, acrid and terrible. Mikey wasn’t shy about his pheromones. I rolled my window down. “Where’d you learn all that stuff, Mikey?”

  “What stuff?”

  “Hormones, chemicals, all that jazz.”

  “I can read,” he said sullenly. Then: “First-year biology. The endocrine system. Plus stuff in the newspapers.”

  “You went to university?”

  “For a year. I’m not stupid.” He pouted like an infant. “I wasn’t always like this.”

  And I understood that Mikey, in his lucid moments, knew that some terrible and debilitating condition had overtaken him, that he had fallen from the sunny aristocracy of the sane into that twilight world whose citizens might mumble or scream but seldom communicate. As if he had wandered into a hidden city of tenements and madhouses and couldn’t find his way out.

  (I know that city, Mikey. Look: Here are its windowless walls and towers, here’s the rust-scabbed WELCOME sign, here are the mossy cobbles under my own weary feet.)

  He was quiet for the rest of the ride, quiet until we pulled into the building’s tiny parking lot. I parked and turned off the ignition. Mikey opened his door a crack, then paused and looked back at me.

  “You be careful,” he said. “Don’t attract attention. Don’t trust Dr. K—she’s not what she seems. And tell Em to be careful, too.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged and moved to leave the car.

  “Mikey,” I said. “Wait.”

  “Thanks for the ride and all—”

  “Mikey. Get back in here and shut that fucking door.”

  He froze. “Don’t yell at me.”

  “You said to tell Em to be careful.”

  “Yeah….”

  “Do you mean my daughter? Is that who you mean?”

  “Emily. The little girl.”

  “I don’t recall introducing you to Emily. I don’t recall mentioning her name.” In fact I kept those two worlds scrupulously separate: my family, Tuesday Group. I would never have mentioned Em to Mikey or vice versa. “How do you know Emily?”

  “Maybe the ants told me.”

  “I don’t want to hear that. No more crazy shit, Mikey: Are you spying on me?”

  “Just tell her to be careful!” He sprang out of the car and then leaned back through the window, his hair hanging in strings across his brick-red face. His breath smelled like the air that wafts from trashcans on hot August afternoons. “I don’t owe you anything, Mr. Fucking Big-Shot Zale!”

  “Stay away from my family, Mikey.”

  “Fuck your family!”

  He slammed the door and scurried away.

  I phoned Corinna. No answer, but maybe she was still at work. I waited an hour, gazing vaguely at CNN and wondering what the limits of Mikey’s psychosis might be. He was unhappy with his meds, had probably stopped taking Thallin, and he was capable of anger: he had demonstrated that.

  Another call. This time Corinna picked up the phone. Suddenly I was in the position of admitting that I might have attracted the attention of lunatic, that the lunatic might be stalking Em. I started by describing Mikey and asking Corinna whether she’d seen anyone like that recently.

  “No,” she said.

  “You sure? This could be important.”

  “Well, not somebody new, anyway. It does sound kind of like Mikey Winston.”

  I gripped the phone. “You know him?”

  “Heck, everybody on the street knows Mikey. He does yard-work, rakes leaves, that kind of thing. I gather it’s what he does for a living, though it can’t be much of one. He’s retarded or something.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So what’s this all about?”

  “Maybe just the long arm of coincidence. Corinna, did you hire Mikey?”

  “He straightens up around the property once a month or so. Mowed the lawn for me last weekend. He’s slow, but he’s meticulous, and he charges half what the professional services charge. The front yard looks practically vacuumed—I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.”

  “Does Em know him?”

  “To wave at, I guess. Hey, you’re starting to scare me. Is there something I should know about Mikey?”

  “How long has he been working for you?”

  “Off and on, maybe six months. Since January, anyway. I remember he shoveled snow after that big storm.”

  January. Well before I ran into him in F-wing. Mikey must have seen me at the house one weekend and made the connection.

  (I recognize you, Mikey had said when we met.)

  Which meant I had accused him groundlessly. Worse, I’d made it obvious that I thought of him as a leper, a subhuman whose company I might be forced to keep but who was too unclean to meet my family.

  Just what Mikey needed when his medication was failing.

  “Hey,” Corinna said. “Are you still there?”

  “Still here.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Nope. But I owe somebody an apology.”

  Story of my life.

  Mikey wasn’t home, but his door, unusually, was unlocked and ajar. It drifted open when I knocked.

  “Mikey?”

  I stepped inside, then closed the door behind me when I heard heavy footsteps from the basement stairwell. When I squinted out Mikey’s peephole into the corridor I saw Mr. Saffka, our aging superintendent, shaking roach powder onto the hallway carpet. He wore rubber gloves and a hardware-store respirator.

  Mikey must have left in a hurry. There were papers scattered over his parquet floor, as if he had filled a pad of typewriter paper and torn out the pages one after the other.

  I picked one up.

  THALLIN, it said at the top, and in the center of the otherwise blank page, this:

  I looked at several more pages, each with similar cryptic anagrams, messages struggling to emerge from the noise inside Mikey’s head. I found this:

  THE RED QUEEN

  THE RED ANT

  QUEEN EMILY

  ANT EM

  And on the sheet beneath it:

  Here is a litany for Dr. Koate, should she ever read this. Here are some things I know. Some sane and sober facts.

  I know insects don’t talk to each other.

  I know insects don’t talk to Mikey Winston.

  I know there is not a vast, slow conversation taking place between the human and the invertebrate world.

  I know that dioxin and methporine and serotonin and fluoxetine are not dialects, words, syllables or signifiers in a global chemical language.

  And I know—give me credit, Dr. Koate—that insects don’t develop pharmaceuticals for Pfizer or Eli Lily, even though insect pheromones are a hot new source of bioactive drugs and tweak-able molecules such as Thallin.

  See, Dr. Koate? No hedging. No doubts. I don’t need the new meds.

  I barreled out of Mikey’s apartment past Mr. Saffka, who gaped at me, eyes wide above his respirator, like a startled June bug. Ran for the car.

  The afternoon light was getting long, but the air was warm and full of early-summer smells: fresh leaves, mown lawns, diesel exhaust from the sighing Bayview buses. Traffic, thank God, wasn’t bad. It was a quick drive to Corinna’s house, which I still sometimes thought of as “our house.”

  We had bought it during one of my rare prosperous years, when interest rates plummeted after the ’87 stock market adjustment. Even so, it was mortgaged to the teeth. It backed onto a ravine. We had rear-window views of forest and a quaint pedestrian bridge.

  Corinna was all smiles when she answered the door. The first giddy flush of a Prozac prescription, I guessed. I asked her if she’d seen Mikey.

  “What is this about Mikey Winston? Are you stalking him or something?”

  Or maybe sh
e’d been drinking. “Corinna, it’s probably nothing. Is Em at home?”

  “Just home from school. She’s playing in the backyard. This isn’t your day with her, though.”

  “I just want to say hi to her.” Reassure myself? Warn her?

  “Okay,” Corinna said dubiously, “but—”

  A voice from inside the house: “Corrie? What’s up?”

  Male voice.

  “I can’t ask you to stay for dinner,” Corinna finished.

  “That’s okay.”

  Everything’s okay with me. I’m an okay kind of guy.

  “But you can say hello to Em if you want.” She frowned. “And explain this to me sometime, all right?”

  I promised I would.

  I went around back. The house shadowed the yard. The cedar fences I had installed a few years ago were starting to look shabby. The lawn could have used work, too, but I guessed that was Mikey’s department.

  Emily was nowhere visible. But the back gate was standing open.

  The gate opened onto a trail, a kid trail leading gently down past birches and silver maples into the deeper shadows of the ravine. We had taught Em to stay out of the ravine on general principle, but it wasn’t known to be dangerous; Corinna used the trail for jogging when weather permitted. Farther downslope there were paved city trails, wooden stairs, kilometer distances posted for dedicated runners.

  The woods were deep. Young plants had covered last year’s mulch. Anything off the trail was a tangle of old and new life. The spring had been warm and wet; undergrowth crowded the margin of the path; mushrooms thrived on the scabbed trunks of fallen trees. There was nothing human to see: no joggers today, no furtive teenage couples. Almost as if the woods had been evacuated; as if a warning sign had been posted.

  No trespassing. Here there be tygers. Keep out—this means you.

  I called for Emily. Odd how tentative, how lost a human voice can sound, even a few yards into the woods. The tall trees creaked and whispered among themselves. I called again.

  There seemed to be an answer this time: a muted sound, choked but human—too deep, I thought, to be Emily’s voice, but frightening in its inarticulate panic. Maybe an animal; a raccoon, say, sick or wounded. Or maybe not. I hurried down the path calling Emily’s name, pausing to listen for a response.

  The path forked into blind alleys, doubled around boulders, paralleled the creek at the bottom of the ravine but seemed never to approach it. Gnats hovered between the trees in blinding clouds.

  I found a shoe at one crook in the path—a girl’s shoe, scuffed but fresh, leather still shiny, and it looked familiar, but was it Em’s? I couldn’t be sure.

  Then I heard the muffled cry again, much closer now. I had doubled back on myself without realizing it: I was approaching Corinna’s house from the south, upslope. I saw the cedar fence directly above me.

  A willow grew where the slope eased out to an escarpment. Its branches reached almost to the trail, enclosing the space around the trunk as neatly as a tent. Concealment, I thought. Camouflage. Other people must have thought so, too. There was a flurry of ancient condoms and crumpled cigarette packs among the fallen leaves.

  I didn’t call for Em again. Every instinct demanded stealth. I parted the willow branches like a hunter.

  More gnats fluttered against my face; then flies, dozens of them, hard as raisins, bumping toward the light.

  I cannot describe the smell under that shadowed tree: acrid, sharp, bitter, earthy…overwhelming. My eyes adjusted to the dim green nimbus. I made out two human figures.

  Human. Approximately.

  I won’t hedge this, Dr. Koate. There’s no point in lying, as you’ve said so often yourself. I’ll try to be objective. Dispassionate.

  Two human figures, both swarming with flies, with ants.

  But not corpses. They were alive.

  One lay on the ground, writhing, mouth choked with insects, gasping stertorously. Mouth open and—well, full

  The other figure stood over the first with apparent complacency, apparently watching; but this figure, too, was covered in a skin of crawling insects, covered so deeply that I couldn’t distinguish any human features.

  (Am I calm enough, Dr. Koate?)

  I don’t know how long I stood there. The cliché turns out to be painfully accurate: it might have been centuries; was probably seconds.

  I moved at last when the standing figure shifted its attention to me. Eyes moved under that coat of ants, that armor of silver-fish, beetles, flies, wasps. Eyes that might have been two more insects, shiny and cool and inscrutable.

  The figure on the ground gagged and screamed, and I ran for the house.

  This differs from what you may have seen on the local news.

  I told the news people and the police I’d found an insect-covered body under the willow while looking for my daughter, and I was honest about what I did next. I ran up the hill, arrived panting and incoherent at Corinna’s back door, told her to phone 911; then I hooked up the garden hose, the sixty-footer that reached both front and back yards, tossed the coil over the cedar fence and unwound it downslope. Turned the garden faucet counterclockwise as far as it would go and hurried back down to the willow.

  Under the willow I found not two figures now but one, just one, the one that had been writhing on the ground; but it was motionless, and the insects were twining back into the mulch even before I turned the water on them.

  I washed the body clean.

  I couldn’t make out the face in the fading light until I leaned close enough to scoop a mass of wriggling larvae out of the open mouth.

  Then I recognized him.

  Mikey Winston. He was still alive, though barely.

  There was not much left of his clothing or, in places, his skin. His body was grotesquely swollen. His eyes were gone, and I don’t know how he recognized me. Maybe by my smell. But he grasped my sleeve, turned to vomit more insects and bloody granulae from his throat; then he said, a nearly soundless wheeze, “Thank you.”

  I told Mikey to lie still, that help was coming. Not that I imagined he had more than minutes to live.

  “They loved me,” he said.

  “Don’t talk, Mikey.”

  “They used to! And I protected them. No pesticides on the lawns. Not on my lawns.”

  He took my hand. I felt the abraded tissue of his palm, the bony clench of his fingers.

  “But the meds don’t work right. I smell bad to them now. They want a new king.” He turned his eyeless face toward mine. “A new queen.”

  I stayed with him until the paramedics arrived, but he was beyond help. The medics made a half-hearted attempt at resuscitation, but even they seemed repulsed by what Mikey had become.

  He died, they tell me, of shock, both physical and anaphylactic. If his wounds hadn’t killed him, the multiple venoms and poisons in his bloodstream surely would have.

  “At least,” one cop told me later, “we can be sure it wasn’t murder.”

  “Regicide,” I said.

  “Regicide? What the fuck’s that, some brand of bug spray?”

  “Just thinking out loud,” I said. “Never mind.”

  Emily, Corinna said, had been in her room all along.

  But she came downstairs during all the commotion.

  Came down barefoot.

  Later that evening, I retrieved her missing shoe and returned it to her. She looked at it, and then at me, and I don’t care to recall the depths of hatred and suspicion in her eyes.

  Turnabout is fair play, right, Dr. Koate? Once my daughter was afraid of me.

  Now I’m frightened of my daughter.

  She took the shoe sullenly and turned to carry it up to her room. In the space where she had been standing, a dozen glossy black ants scurried away.

  Maybe it was a mistake to tell Dr. Koate the story. Plainly she didn’t believe me, though she was relentlessly sympathetic, reserved, calm. Deep as the earth, that calm, and weighty as all the insects in the world.
>
  Dr. Koate prescribed Thallin to go with the Lithotabs. Ostensibly to suppress what she views as my alarming slide into paranoia, but there is, I think, a subtext: an invitation to join in the invisible protocols of the planet, take my place in the new and shifting global chemical discourse.

  I have the bottle now. I have it in my hand. An innocuous brown pharmacy bottle with my name and dosage and doctor printed on the label. Open the lid, and I can see sixty daily doses of Thallin: small crosshatched pills the same shade of purple as those Flintstone vitamins we used to give Emily.

  The ants are worse since Mikey died. They come up between the floorboards. Mr. Saffka has stopped putting down roach powder, for reasons he won’t divulge. The roaches are getting worse, too.

  But it’s the ants that circle around me like an anxious audience.

  They want me to take the pills.

  Corinna, is there really a secret language? Em, have you learned to speak it?

  Do I belong here?

  If I take the pills, will I be able to hear my daughter’s voice?

  Only one way to find out. A cup of water, a toss of the hand, a simple swallow…peristalsis, the transit of molecules, the infiltration of atoms in the blood….

  Now wait for morning.

  ULYSSES SEES THE MOON

  IN THE BEDROOM WINDOW

  Paul Bridger invited me to his home to see the unusual thing he’d dug out of his garden. I accepted the invitation because I meant to seduce his wife.

  Let me clarify. “Something out of the garden” was Paul’s shorthand for any new item he added to the random collection of objects that decorated (if that’s the word) his house. His wife was Leah, a small woman of forty with a trim figure and green eyes that had grown more deliciously melancholy over the last ten years, and “seduce” is shorthand, too. I believed I had already seduced Leah Bridger; all that remained was to consummate the seduction. To speak the necessary words and arrange to see her while Paul was off at some academic conference in Reykjavik or Brisbane. We would open a future together (I imagined) like a great, joyous book.

  I parked in the gravel drive of Paul and Leah’s unfailingly tasteful Rosedale property. The night was warm for October, a big three-quarter moon rising in a sky still luminous with dusk. Paul’s house backed onto a ravine, and I heard something calling from the woods, a cat or a raccoon; some animal in heat, anyway. I came up the beveled-stone walk carrying a bottle of white wine. Leah opened the door before I knocked.