The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Change the equation and everything might topple. Her alcoholism might expand to engulf her; a new lover might prove fickle or even hostile; she would be exposed to a world she found deeply threatening.

  And where did I fit into this equation? Or rather, where had I innocently imagined I might fit? Leah’s small erotic gestures, the touch of her lips in the dark, were as inevitable and as meaningless as her fourth drink. Fifth drink. I might actually have contrived to fuck her, if I hadn’t stupidly fallen in love.

  That was the forbidden threshhold, the door into chaos.

  And what would we have been together, Leah and I? I imagined the two of us locked in a tightening spiral of need and contempt—not the tidy impersonal orbit she had worked out with Paul, but a slow dive into the abyss. She would come to hate me. The feeling would probably be mutual.

  I visualized a future as long and dry as a desert horizon.

  There was nothing here for me.

  I dropped the rock.

  Paul was apologetic over dinner.

  “I’m sorry, Matthew. It seemed to me there was something unusual about the stone. That’s why I called it a scrying rock. Just a touch of—the future? The past? But that must sound absurd.”

  “A little,” I said.

  “So the thesis is unsupported.”

  “I guess the Superior Being isn’t with us tonight.”

  “I guess not,” Paul Bridger said amiably.

  He excused himself when the meal was finished, and I was briefly alone with Leah once more.

  The steady flow of cocktails had left her sullen and remote. She hadn’t eaten much of the dinner she’d prepared—charred veal medallions and asparagus abandoned too long in the steamer.

  She said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  “About what?”

  “I know what you saw.” She wagged a finger at me. The nail polish was chipped. “I saw it too, Matthew. Last night. With the stone. You and I. Dead in the water. One big joyless pity fuck. And then not even that. There’s nothing there for us”

  I said carefully, “Is it so obvious?”

  “Not much fun having your daydreams stripped away, is it, Matthew? Not much fucking fun.

  “No fun at all.

  So the evening ended.

  Leah, one drink past her limit, fell asleep on the sofa, strands of lank hair across her face. Paul showed me to the door.

  He was smiling. He always smiled, and I wondered how he did it. The smile was by all appearances genuine, a benign amusement that seemed never to fade. “Don’t worry about Leah,” he said confidently. “She’ll perk up in the morning.”

  It did not occur to me to wonder why Paul had invited me here or what he imagined he had accomplished.

  There was another yowl from the darkness outside. Why do cats make such tortured sounds when they’re in heat?

  Ulysses came hurtling down the stairs as Paul opened the door for me. I stepped outside quickly and said good night. Paul thanked me for coming.

  The screen door was still open a crack when Ulysses bumped into it, mewling. Paul reached down in a practised motion and picked up the unhappy animal, latching the door with calm authority and separating Ulysses from whatever it was Ulysses so plainly longed for out in the unsilent dark.

  “You know better than that, Ulysses,” I heard him whisper. “There’s nothing out there for you.”

  And the hair stood up on my arms.

  PLATO’S MIRROR

  1.

  “You don’t know me,” she said, eyes wide. “But I got this for you.”

  It was a package about the size of a coffee-table book, flat, wrapped in brown paper and tied with butcher’s twine. “You’re right,” I said, blocking the doorway. “I don’t know you.”

  She smiled. “I’m Faye,” she said. “Faye Constance.”

  She stood as tall as my collar, wide mouth, small nose, eyes a stunning shade of green—sunny clover, summer lawn. (Beware all green-eyed girls, my father used to say. A drunk’s advice.) She was, she told me later, all of twenty-two years old.

  “I don’t know you, Faye Constance, so I have to ask: what do you want? And what’s in the package?”

  “Oh my God!” She put a hand to her mouth, mock-horrified. “You must think it’s like a letter bomb or something! Oh God! No—what happened is, I read your book. The back cover said you lived in town. So when I came across this I knew I had to look you up and give it to you. It’s not as weird as it sounds… don’t look at me like I’m from another planet or whatever.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  She thrust the package at me. “It’s a present, that’s all. From an admirer.”

  The package was heavier than it looked. Downright hefty. She turned away.

  “Wait,” I said. “I can’t accept this.” Adding, against my own better judgment, “Not from a stranger.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “I know your name. That’s different.” I checked my watch. “You can have fifteen minutes of my time.”

  “Pm not buying time.”

  “My time you can’t buy. Come in. If you want.”

  Her smile broadened. The glare was blinding.

  Faye gazed at my apartment, which Helen had once called my “seduce-atorium.” The walls were lined with books, many of which I had read. The bay window was tall and relatively sunny, for a fifth-story one-bedroom buried in a canyon of condo towers. Two potted cacti braced the window and cast faintly green reflections across the ceiling. The room was done in green: in what the paint-chip and upholstery-sample folks called sea foam, ochre, and mist. The sofa was large and inviting if somewhat checkered with coffee stains.

  Not that I meant to seduce Faye Constance. I was still a little afraid of her.

  My work attracts the emotionally damaged. I had met them, at “psychic fairs” and Chapters signings, clutching copies of Plato’s Mirror and peering at me through smudged lenses murky as millponds. They believed, these people, believed with all their stilted hearts and inadequate minds, that I had tapped the wisdom of the ancients and was dispensing it one volume per annum through an American paperback press. A loyal crowd, but not necessarily stable.

  So I laid it out for her. Counting my fingers: “One. Everything I know about history I learned auditing a classics course at the University. Two. The book is fiction. I made it up. For money. Three. Meeting me won’t make you a better person. Probably the opposite. I drink and I smoke dope and I have a lot of shitty friends.”

  “That’s supposed to discourage me, right?”

  “Only if you’re smart.”

  She laughed, which was disarming. “Look, I don’t want to marry you. I just like your writing. I was rummaging around the thrift shops and I found… well, something that made me think of you. So I was a little impulsive. It’s no big deal. Anyway,” checking her watch, “you can have your time back. I have to be somewhere.”

  As suddenly as that, I didn’t want her to leave.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I was harsh. Give me a number, Faye Constance. In case I want to say thanks.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. The number is in the package.”

  She smiled good-bye and headed for the door. From behind she looked like some Botticelli angel who had just discovered the possibilities of gender. The seduce-atorium was sorry to see her go.

  I opened the package—wouldn’t you?

  It was, of course, a mirror. An “antique” mirror, the sort you find in shops where any object sufficiently motheaten and older than Sarah Michelle Gellar is deemed to be an antique. (By which definition, wasn’t I one?)

  The frame was pinholed Victorian gingerbread with flakes of gilt still clinging to it, held together with blackened finishing nails and backed with brittle brown paper. The glass itself was probably older than the frame, and where the silvering had corroded there were patches of quivery distortion, the effect you get passing a magnet in front of a TV tube. The mirror reflected my own homely fac
e, no more and no less. (Had Faye been disappointed by the face behind the book? But I create illusions and dispel them: that’s what I do.)

  Tucked between glass and frame was a note in Faye’s childish handwriting.

  PLATO’S MIRROR? You never know!!

  Signed, Your admirer. Plus name, address, telephone number.

  “But it’s ugly,” Conrad said.

  “Is that a problem? I like you, don’t I?”

  “Mm. But you don’t hang me on the wall, notice.”

  “Not that I haven’t thought of it.”

  Conrad, my neighbor-three-doors-down, grimaced at his reflection. I had put Faye’s mirror in the hallway adjacent to the bathroom. The light was dim here, making the mirror (I hoped) more decorative and less obviously trashy. Conrad disagreed. His image moved in the surface of the glass like a dolphin attempting to surface. “Your taste is unfailing, Donald. Everything you own, it’s all so—rec room.”

  “Ugly but fun?”

  “Ugly, anyhow.” He bent closer to my ear. The noise of the party had already reached deafening and was approaching traumatic. “By the way. Word of caution. Watch out for Helen. She’s not a happy camper.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Judging by her mood, not tonight.”

  Fifteen people in my apartment was a crowd; twenty was practically coitus. Maybe twenty-five had arrived for the weekly zoo. Oh, we were a motley crowd: five writers, three contract programmers, a dozen unemployed intellectuals and aging students, a couple of hookers, my dentist, my drug dealer, and my girlfriend. Helen. Girlfriend, I suspected, for not much longer. She was allergic to tobacco smoke, pot smoke, perfume, and red wine, which begged the question: what was she doing here?

  At the moment she was engaged in a raging argument with Conrad’s partner William, a writer of small-press fiction. The subject had been literary to begin with but the conversation had deteriorated when William, waxing impatient, described T. S. Eliot as “a closet queen, sewn up so tight he couldn’t fart authentically.” Helen’s graduate thesis had been a feminist defense of T. S. Eliot. Eliot was her red flag. I had learned to wince at the sound of his name.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “William’s baiting you, Hel. Ignore him.”

  She whirled on me. Her eyes—brown—flashed. “Stop defending me!”

  “I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Then stop defending your asshole friends!”

  Things had been going bad for weeks. Helen was, as they say, conflicted. She liked me, we got along well (when we got along at all), but underneath all that me-too bohemianism was a fragile Bishop Strachan debutante still yearning for cashmere and clean forks.

  Or else—looking at it from her point of view—she had fallen in with a crowd whose appetites and poverty had turned out to be more dismal than stylish.

  In other words, we embarrassed her.

  Later, she took me into the bedroom and closed the door against a crush of bodies. For reprimands, not a quick fuck. Times change. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I mean it. I’m tired of beer on the rug and puke in the kitchen sink and I’m tired, frankly, of you, Donald, and your self-loathing and your pussy-chasing and the crappy way you treat people.”

  “About covers it,” I said.

  “And that self-serving ironic tone you take whenever you feel threatened.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. This. For every time you stood me up while you diddled some young ignoramus.”

  She raked her nails across my cheek and wrestled her way down the hallway to the door. Helen slammed doors for punctuation. Slam: period. Full stop.

  The mirror was full of restless shapes. I headed for the kitchen. On the way I turned up the music. Polyrythmic, agressive, dangerous. Like me.

  What I had neglected to tell her was how much I loved her.

  The crowd faded around three, spilling out into the empty street. Conrad and William stayed behind to share a spliff. They were practically home already.

  Conrad was a city-bred white boy and William was a Nova Scotia black, but they had developed, in tandem, similar voices, similar mannerisms. At ease, they draped their arms across each other’s shoulders and inclined together like lazy willows. I envied them.

  I had told them the story of the mirror. (Stroking my wounded vanity with images of Faye.) Conrad said sleepily, “Well, what if she’s right?”

  “Right about what?”

  “The mirror.”

  “The mirror?”

  “Sure the mirror. How do you know it doesn’t show, ah—what was it you called them in your book? Architects?”

  “Archons. Archons and Essences.”

  William stirred from his nestling place at Conrad’s shoulder. “What are Archons?”

  “Shush. It’s a Greek word.”

  “Right,” I said. “It’s a Greek word for ’bullshit.’ Come on, Conrad, I get enough of that crap from the public at large.”

  “Donald, hon, I know you’re a fraud; you don’t have to remind me. But, heck, magic mirrors, can’t we even play?”

  “Busman’s holiday. You play with it if you want. Just don’t break it.”

  “You really do like the ugly thing!”

  “No. I like the pretty young thing who brought it to me.”

  “I see. And how exactly did it work in your little book?”

  In my “little book,” Plato’s Mirror was the long-forgotten secret of the Eleusinian rites—the ancient Greek Demeter cult that survived, in one form or another, for almost two thousand years. The Eleusinian mysteries remain shrouded in secrecy, but according to most scholars they involved an annual pageant at an underground spring. “Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and its beginning.” Pindar.

  The mirror was my own invention. It was the mirror, I claimed, that had inspired Plato’s fable of the cave. You know the story? If a man lived out his life in a cave with only the narrowest of pinhole openings and no way in or out, he would experience the world as shadows projected on a wall. And if this hypothetical cave dweller were to be transported outside for the first time, the experience would be overwhelming, instant immersion in a madly hyperreal universe of colors and shapes and textures.

  Plato’s Mirror, I claimed, provided that glimpse of an unmediated world. Created by Greek alchemists, the mirror had been banished to the lightless underground, where it became the secret icon of the Eleusinian Mysteries, to be experienced only by devotees and even then only briefly. The human mind, after all, can bear only so much reality.

  I had adduced my evidence from Gnostic manuscripts and freshly discovered Dead Sea scrolls which only I had seen. Documents, in other words, that didn’t exist. The book was punctuated with pseudo-scholarly footnotes but all the references were blind, unavailable in any real-world library.

  Fold in a little Atlantis lore, a bit of Masonic paranoia, and a soupçon of New Age millenarianism; yield: one not-quite-beststelling addition to the crackpot rack of your local bookstore. I had contracted for three more volumes. Carlos Castañeda, watch your ass.

  Conrad wouldn’t leave it alone. “It works,” he said, “the mirror I mean, only in the dark, right?”

  “Conrad, if you want to turn off the lights and look at your absence of a reflection, be my guest.”

  “Vampires,” William chimed in. “Vampires have a mirror thing, don’t they?”

  “Vampires you can’t see in a mirror. I think what Donald is talking about are monsters you can only see in a mirror.”

  “Are there such things?”

  “No,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, it’s pretend, all right?”

  “Shall we prove it?” Conrad wouldn’t let this go; he was off on some coy, stoned trajectory of his own.

  “If it’ll shut you up, I’ll turn off the lights and dance nude.”

  “I am,” he said haughtily, “not tempted. Geez, Donald, did Helen leave with your sen
se of humor in her purse?”

  So I turned off the lights and sat back down.

  “This is,” William announced, “already spooky.”

  “Draw the blinds,” Conrad said. “The streetlights are glaring.”

  “Draw them yourself.”

  He did, eliminating everything but a dim green glow. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face—couldn’t see anything but the faint silhouettes of the cacti, each tall as a man. There was a brief flare as Conrad toked once more before setting off for the hallway. We had all smoked enough to make it seem like a long trip. And yes, there was some of that giggly thrill about the occasion: just us kids, up past our bedtime, stealing Mom’s cigarettes and telling ghost stories.

  “Donald!”

  Conrad’s voice sounded hollow and small, as if he had gone much too far away. “What?”

  “Your mirror is broken!”

  “Broken?”

  “Must be! I can’t see a thing!”

  “Stop torturing me, Conrad. Shouldn’t you and William be asleep by now?”

  “Spoilsport.” I heard his shoes scuffling along the linoleum, his small laugh. “All right, we’ll—ah—”

  Long pause.

  “Conrad?”

  Nothing.

  Annoyed, I switched on the lamp next to the sofa. William sat up, still playing along but faintly uneasy. Conrad was out of sight around the corner, all of three feet down the hall. He stumbled back into the living room, frowning. “Not funny, Donald.…”

  “What’s not funny?”

  “Practical jokes.” He seemed genuinely hurt. “You set me up, didn’t you? So what is it really—some kind of computer display back of the glass? One of those LCD things?”

  “Who’s setting who up, exactly?”

  “Ah, well… I don’t grudge a joke at my expense. Kudos, Donald, and good night. Thank you for a lovely party. Sorry about Helen.”

  “Don’t kid a kidder,” I said to the closing door.

  Helen called in the morning—far too early. Her voice on the phone was wistful. “Maybe,” she said, “I was out of line last night. I meant what I said. But I didn’t have to say it like that.”