The Perseids and Other Stories

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Don’t apologize. You were right.”

  “I was right? Is this a first? Donald Wilcox admits he might have acted like a jerk from time to time?”

  “Right about us, I mean. Maybe we’re not, as they say, a viable option.”

  “You don’t like hearing the truth about yourself, do you?”

  “I did kind of hope we’d finished that part of the conversation.”

  “What’s her name this time?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I swear to God, Donald, when I met you I thought I saw something fundamentally good about you. Was it all an act? A little seductive innocence, just enough to get you laid? Like some, I don’t know, spider, spinning out those psycho books and devouring any woman you happen to catch.…”

  “You must have the wrong number, Hel. This isn’t the Verbal Abuse Club.”

  And she was gone, as quick as that. I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep.

  I made a pot of coffee. Then I called Faye Constance.

  2.

  “Of course it works,” Faye said.

  “Didn’t we make a rule? No feng shut, no crop circles, and no magic mirrors?”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  Two months had passed, during which time I had learned some things about Faye Constance. Under that lovely oxymoron of a name was a young woman of fierce enthusiasms and grave gullibility; a believer, but not a fanatic; not a virgin, but enthusiastically and youthfully adventurous in bed; a self-proclaimed poet, apt to leap up at midnight full of odes and couplets, un-publishable; by day, a transcriptionist at some dreary Provincial Ministry or other. “You never leave this place,” she had complained, so we’d been doing dinners out, sentimental movies, head-cracking concerts. Tonight, however, we dined in. Faye had rented Emma. But she seemed more interested in the mirror.

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” I said, “except maybe your obsession with that slab of glass.”

  “Obsession, great, thank you very much. But, Donald—it does work. I tried it last night, when you went out for roti.”

  “I wish you could hear yourself. Faye, it works? What’s that even mean?”

  “I’m not saying it’s necessarily the Plato’s Mirror in your book. Just that it does the same thing.”

  “The book is crap, my love, and there’s no such thing as a magic mirror.”

  “Or Archons, or Essences? You didn’t make those up.”

  “No. I borrowed them from the Gnostic writers. Who did make them up.”

  “There’s some truth in every religion, I think.”

  “Faye. Come on. What are you saying here?”

  “Let me show you.”

  “No. No games. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Just let me show you!”

  And I agreed, because I remembered Conrad’s performance, and that made me a little afraid, and I was mad at myself for being afraid and I didn’t want Faye even to suspect that I took any of this seriously. Helen was gone for good and Faye had become the significant female presence in my life, and without Faye’s adulation what would I be? A lonely con artist, a writer without a text, a congenital liar.

  Faye was afraid of nothing. I think she was born without the fear gene. She got a double dose of puppy-dog enthusiasm instead. Uneasy as I felt, it was a joy to watch her fuss around the apartment, pulling curtains, even switching off the air conditioner because it might emit hostile technological vibrations. She brough the mirror into the bedroom. “Now we take off our clothes,” she said. “We have to be pristine.”

  Could she have been more pristine, stripped to pure pale geometry, nipples royally erect? She braced the mirror on a dresser and against the wall, angled slightly up. From where I stood I could see her reflection, knees to crown, muzzy in the age-frosted glass. And she could see mine. My hairy-legged and paunchy male nudity. “Now turn off the light,” she said.

  I flipped the switch.

  I looked toward Faye and saw nothing but whirly retinal static. I looked in the direction of the mirror and saw—

  Must I say this?

  I would much rather lie.

  Saw an angel.

  Hyperbole in the service of truth isn’t my strong suit. No, I don’t know what an angel looks like. But her reflection in the mirror was awe-inspiring. I drew a quick, frightened breath. Frightened, because how can there be a reflection in a dark mirror? And how can a reflection make its own light, especially this cool mother-of-pearl radiance fractured to rainbows in the still air?

  Seconds ticked away in the silence. Faye said breathlessly, “Donald?” In the mirror, an angel-mouth moved. “What do you seer

  The distilled liquor of a thousand stained-glass windows. The glow of a cloudless summer day, compacted into human form. Sum of all the wide-eyed, wide-legged girls I had ever convinced to take off their clothes, innocence flaring into soft night breezes. Starlight in amber. “I see,” I said, “I think, it’s you, Faye, only, only.…”

  “Yes,” she said, meaning I know. “And I see you.”

  Instantly, I turned my face away.

  “Donald?”

  I switched on the light.

  Her face was bright with tears. “But you’re so—so fucking beautiful! Oh, Donald! Donald!”

  “You know what we saw,” she said as we lay together in bed.

  I had turned the mirror to the wall. “Trick of the light.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s a lie,” Faye said, turning her back to me. “A cruel lie.” I’m a liar by trade. The cruelty is just a bad habit.

  That summer Faye took me to the shop where she’d bought the mirror—not an antique store but a cramped secondhand bookstore on Harbord Street called Finders. The mirror had been taking up space along a side wall; the pale silhouette where it had hung was still visible against the yellowed paint.

  Faye said she had asked the owner if the mirror was for sale and he had shrugged and agreed to take ten dollars for it. The woman behind the cash counter claimed to know nothing about the deal, and the owner, she told us, “doesn’t like to be disturbed.”

  Apart from that, I didn’t discuss the mirror with Faye. She knew what she had seen; she smiled obliquely whenever I dodged the subject.

  But I knew what I had seen, too.

  I just didn’t like to think about it.

  I ran into Helen at the Starbucks near my building.

  She was amiable, if a little wary, when I joined her at the table. She was seeing someone, she announced. And so, of course, was I. With these admissions we relaxed into the past tense of “us,” a surprisingly comfortable space.

  “Yeah,” Helen said, “Conrad told me about your current. A little young, he seems to think.”

  “Not as young as she looks. And Conrad is a gossip.”

  “You think it’ll last?”

  I shrugged.

  “In other words, no.”

  “I didn’t say that, Helen.”

  “Poor Donald.” She looked genuinely sympathetic. “It never goes away, does it? That picture in the back of your head. Daddy drunk and mom all bruises. The nightmares.”

  The trouble with women is that sometimes I confide in them. “I’m not sure this is something I want to talk about in Starbucks on a Saturday morning.”

  Helen scrunched up her paper cup. “Somebody ought to warn that girl, Donald. Maybe even you.”

  Turned out Conrad had befriended Faye; the two of them had gone thrift-shop trawling together. Conrad collected vintage Barbie dolls and accessories. Faye liked to pick up any old piece of colored glass: bottles, paperweights, vases. Sunlight through a prism could keep her fascinated for hours. She had magpie instincts.

  I went with them on one of these weekend flea-market expeditions. Had no idea there were so many Thrift Villas and Salvation Army shops in the city. And they all smelled the same: of old clothes and rust, Lysol and mildew. Faye and Conrad shopped knowingly, pawing throug
h trash for gems while I scanned the book racks, the literary equivalent of the Elephant’s Graveyard, last stop for Edgar Cayce, Carl G. Soziere, Lobsang Rampa, and someday, perhaps, my humble self. Sun-faded spines all uniform yellow. This, too, a sort of mirror.

  We lunched at a suburban fried-chicken factory. Faye was off at the washroom when Conrad said, “You ought to keep this girl, Donald.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m serious. She’s a sweet, bright, gentle little thing. She doesn’t deserve the usual Donald treatment—six months fucking and a fare-thee-well.”

  “I’ll treasure your advice.”

  “There is,” he said meaningfully, “a little magic about that girl.”

  “Magic?”

  “Well? She gave you the mirror, didn’t she?”

  “Ah—the magic mirror.”

  “I’ve seen it, remember? Plus we looked at it again one night. Last week. When you were out.”

  “Did you.”

  “A little functional magic in your life at last, and all you can do is grind your teeth.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic, Conrad.”

  “Oh, I don’t imagine there’s anything special about that old mirror, but the magic, that’s authentic. Comes by way of Faye, I suspect. Is that why it scares you so much? There’s nothing bad in the mirror, you know.”

  “Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Too late to slam that barn door, Donald. Those horses are out.”

  The experience of making love to Faye, the nights she stayed over, was indescribably sweet, subtle, and gratifying. No impatience marred the act and the only selfishness was mutual and guiltless. In bed, she set me free. How then to describe, how even to admit to myself the occasional impulse, at the height of our passion, to take her guileless head into my hands and twist it until something snapped?

  “Who is it,” Helen used to ask, “who is it, Donald, who lives inside you, who knows how to do or say exactly the thing that hurts the most? What kind of monster has instincts like that?”

  No monster. I speak from the heart.

  Faye says I write from the heart, too: that’s how I know things I don’t think I know.

  3.

  The sequel to Plato’s Mirror was called The Book of Lies. Due in September, and it wasn’t going well. Which made me irritable. Which made me say things to Faye I shouldn’t have said. Which she forgave, with bravery and wounded eyes. Which led me to think our days together were numbered.

  Hot summer that year. Late asphalt-scented nights, fan-cooled sheets, long showers. August storms rolled out of the west in gray-tumbled waves. For four nights in a row dry lightning flickered over the lake.

  It was storming when our last August Friday party broke up, leaving behind the usual overturned bottles, aggrieved neighbors, and Conrad and William and Faye to appreciate the four A.M. calm.

  Four ante meridiem, and the night cool enough that I turned off the air conditioner and threw open the windows, letting gusts of damp air flush away memory and smoke. We were all four of us beyond sleep, our private clocks lurching toward sunrise. There was no rain but plenty of distant lightning and fitful thunder. In the dark street outside, window awnings flapped like captive birds.

  We didn’t mention the mirror—Faye and Conrad were too much in awe of it to raise the subject lightly; William remained gently agnostic, and I despised the thing—until a great flash of lightning filled the apartment with purple light and thunder rattled the casements. A nearby strike. A transformer or hydroelectric substation had taken the hit, I guessed, because the lamplight dimmed and died and didn’t come back.

  The darkness made our shared space smaller. Faye, Conrad, and William huddled on the sofa while I rummaged for a tea candle in the kitchen drawer. The thought of the mirror struck them simultaneously while I was out of the room.

  “Mirrors are funny things,” William was saying, gossamer-eyed by candlelight. “When I was little there was a game we played. Like a dare-you thing: who’s brave enough? You go into the bathroom and you turn off the light and you stare into the mirror, and there was this little chant, like I want to see the ghost of Lizzie Borden or some shit. So you think, hey, I’m not that stupid, and you do it, but you know what? Not five minutes go by before there’s old Lizzie Borden staring back at you with her crazy eyes all lit up. It’s imagination and bullshit, and you know that, but… there she is.”

  “Who’s Lizzie Borden?” Faye asked.

  “Axe murderess,” Conrad said. “Before your time.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Ghost stories. Shouldn’t we roast a marshmallow or something?”

  “Donald is reinforcing his little wall of rationality. I think he wants us to help.”

  Maybe. I had played that game too, the mirror game, when I was young, and William was right. Try as you might not to see it, the monster would always show up, raise your hackles, scare you into the light. I dislike mirrors. I dream about them from time to time. The notion for Plato’s Mirror had come straight from a nightmare, and that was a factoid I had neglected to share with Helen or Faye.

  “But it’s a perfect opportunity!” Faye said fervently. “Look, Donald, the whole city is dark.”

  And so it was. The blackout had quenched every light for blocks around. There were only occasional headlights down along Bathurst Street, and not many of those. In the apartment tower across the alley, one or two flashlights flickered behind the windows. Otherwise, dark. But so what?

  “The mirror!” Faye said. “We can see the whole city—I mean the essence of the city.”

  “If we hurry,” Conrad added. “They usually fix these things pretty quick.”

  “Gimme the candle,” Faye said. “I’ll fetch the mirror.”

  I said, “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yes!” A chorus. “We can!”

  I burned my indignation in a joint and watched them go about their little game. Faye took the mirror out onto the minuscule balcony that adjoins the kitchen and balanced it on the Adirondack chair. Their voices were nervous and enthusiastic: children’s voices. Faye had found the Christmas candles and they each carried one, like monks with gaudy votive candles, red green white, initiates into the Mystery. But no Dionysian underground, only this fifth-story pigeon perch.

  The hush of the four A.M. city was shocking. Live in a city long enough, you forget about quiet. Stepping out onto the balcony (reluctantly, with a candle of my own) I heard all the sounds normally lost under the pressure of daylight: dripping eaves and drawn breath and even a train whistle, some CN freight crossing the Don. Tag ends of lightning flickered far away.

  “Now blow out the candles,” Faye said solemnly.

  Out they went.

  “Yours too, Donald.”

  “I like the light. Helps keep me from falling down.”

  “Don’t be a pig! You’ll ruin it.”

  So I blew out the candle.

  But I didn’t look at the mirror. In the dark, would Faye see this small act of cowardice?

  I should have covered my ears, too. There was, at first, nothing to hear, only the steady drip of rainwater and a breath of wind. Then, finally, their voices, hushed with awe: So beautiful and It can’t be and oh God!

  So I looked, despite my best intentions.

  At first the mirror seemed merely opaque, the same fogged-silver Victorian grotesque that might have been salvaged from any condemned Toronto boardinghouse or crumbling semidetached—junk, in other words. But then the glass misted and roiled like fog on a lake, and images surfaced, faintly at first, then suddenly crisp. From where I stood the mirror reflected the city skyline, towers immersed in cloud made bright and intricate as cowry shells in clear water, and every brick a prism.

  “It’s,” William stuttered, “heartbreaking.…”

  And it was. In the absence of light every object glowed with its own essence, radiated purer colors than any rainbow. How can a color you’ve never seen be so ac
hingly familiar?

  “And the people,” Faye whispered.

  People?

  “Look hard,” she urged me. “Let it in.”

  Yes. Behind stone walls, brick walls, and forests of rusted re-bar: people. People sleeping, mainly. People like small galaxies, constellations suspended in the night. “So beautiful,” Faye sighed again. No two alike, yet all the same, as if souls had fallen from the clouds and drifted through open windows, the banked win-drift of humanity.

  Conrad and William had found each other’s reflections. I saw them, too. They were in love, and love has its own spectrum, its own unearthly color. Something bright and gauzy (ectoplasm? passion?) floated between them, delicate as lace. Their bodies had been unclothed by the mirror. They had become bright vortices of energy, knots of life on a rope of spine. Bones like pastel coral.

  Now Faye stepped into view. I felt the heat of her attention on my skin. She said, “Oh, Donald!” Words rippled the air. Her eyes were at once fierce and gentle, lenses focusing the light of distant suns. “Look at yourself!”

  I meant to. I swear I did. But something else caught my attention.

  “Faye?” I said.

  “… yes…?”

  “Some of those people out there—they’re not—”

  I felt her frown. “Not what? I don’t know what you mean.”

  Not Essences. Oh, I saw the Essences, jewel-bright in their beds and sleeping the sleep of children. But also—look harder—the others. The ugly, intelligent ones. Call them Archons. They float (look harder, Faye, look as hard as you can) between the buildings, patroling the night in clockwork formation, skeletal, big-headed, hairy and malevolent as spiders.…

  I backed up a step.

  You look at them, they look at you. Their attention is caustic and demanding.

  “Donald, what is it?”

  “Can’t you see them?”

  Maybe she couldn’t. Bless her green eyes: maybe only the good light got through. She started to say, “Look at yourself, Donald, and then—” But I lashed out, kicked the slats of the Adirondack chair, which collapsed spectacularly, the mirror shattering against the concrete floor of the balcony, each fragment flashing briefly bright as lightning before it chimed into darkness.