The Perseids and Other Stories

  Nice of our neighbors to warn us, I thought.

  But how long had that warning bell been ringing, and for how many centuries had we ignored it?

  Deirdre’s description of the Soziere book as a “bubble theory” haunted me.

  No proof, no evidence could exist: that was ruled out by the theory itself—or at least, as Ziegler had implied, there would be no evidence one could share.

  But there had been evidence, at least in my case: the paperback books, “anomalous” books imported, presumably, from some other timeline, a history I had since lost to cardiac arrest, a car accident, clonazepam.

  But the books were gone.

  I had traded them, in effect, for You Will Never Die.

  Which I had returned to Oscar Ziegler.

  Cup your hands as you might. The water runs through your fingers.

  There was only the most rudimentary service at the crematorium where Ziegler’s body was burned. A few words from an Episcopal minister Deirdre had hired for the occasion, an earnest young man in clerical gear and neatly pressed Levis who pronounced his consolations and hurried away as if late for another function. Deirdre said, afterward, “I don’t know if I’ve been given a gift or an obligation. For a man who never left his room, Mr. Ziegler had a way of weaving people into his life.” She shook her head sadly. “If any of it really matters. I mean, if we’re not devoured by aliens or God knows what. You can’t turn on the news these days.… Well, I guess he bailed out just in time.”

  Or moved on. Moved someplace where his emphysema was curable, his failing heart reparable, his aging cells regenerable.

  Shunting the train Oscar Ziegler along a more promising if less plausible track.…

  “The evidence,” I said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The books I told you about.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t get a good look at them.” She frowned. “Is that what you’re thinking? Oh, shit, that fucking Soziere book of his! It’s bait, Mr. Keller, don’t you get it? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he loved to suck people into whatever cloistered little mental universe he inhabited, misery loves company, and that book was always the bait—”

  “No,” I said, excited despite my best intentions, as if Ziegler’s cremation had been a message, his personal message to me, that the universe discarded bodies like used Kleenex but that consciousness was continuous, seamless, immortal.… “I mean about the evidence. You didn’t see it—but someone did.”

  “Leave it alone. You don’t understand about Ziegler. Oscar Ziegler was a sour, poisonous old man. Maybe older than he looked. That’s what I thought of when I read Soziere’s book: Oscar Ziegler, someone so ridiculously old that he wakes up every morning surprised he’s still a human being.” She stared fiercely at me. “What exactly are you contemplating here—serial suicide?”

  “Nothing so drastic.”

  I thanked her and left.

  The paradox of proof.

  I went to Niemand’s store as soon as I left Deirdre.

  I had shown the books to Niemand, the book dealer. He was the impossible witness, the corroborative testimony. If Niemand had seen the books, then I was sane; if Niemand had seen the books they might well turn up among Ziegler’s possessions, and I could establish their true provenance and put all this dangerous Soziere mythology behind me.

  But Niemand’s little second-story loft store had closed. The sign was gone. The door was locked and the space was for lease.

  Neither the jeweler downstairs nor the coffee-shop girl next door remembered the store, its clientele, or Niemand himself.

  There was no Niemand in the phone book. Nor could I find his commercial listing. Not even in my yellow pages at home, where I had first looked it up.

  Or remembered looking it up.

  Anomalous experience.

  Which constituted proof, of a kind, though Ziegler was right; it was not transferable. I could convince no one, ultimately, save myself.

  The television news was full of apocalypse that night. A rumor had swept the Internet that the great gamma-ray burst was imminent, only days away. No, it was not, scientists insisted, but they allowed themselves to be drawn by their CNN inquisitors into hypothetical questions. Would there be any safe place? A half-mile underground, say, or two, or three? (Probably not, they admitted; or, We don’t have the full story yet.)

  To a man, or woman, they looked unsettled and skittish.

  I went to bed knowing she was out there, Lorraine, I mean, out among the plenitude of worlds and stars. Alone, perhaps, since I must have died to her—infinities apart, certainly, but enclosed within the same inconceivably vast multiuniverse, as alike, in our way, as two snowflakes in an avalanche.

  I slept with the pill bottle cradled in my hand.

  The trick, I decided, was to abandon the charade, to mean the act.

  In other words, to swallow twenty or thirty tablets—a more difficult act than you might imagine—and wash them down with a neat last shot of Glenlivet.

  But Deirdre called.

  Almost too late.

  Not late enough.

  I picked up the phone, confused, my hands butting the receiver like antagonistic parade balloons. I said, or meant to say, “Lorraine?”

  But it was Deirdre, only Deirdre, and before long Deirdre was shouting in an annoying way. I let the phone drop. I suppose she called 911.

  2.

  I woke in a hospital bed.

  I lay there passively for more than an hour, by the digital clock on the bedstand, cresting waves of sleep and wondering at the silence, until I was visited by Candice.

  Her name was written on her lapel tag. Candice was a nurse, with a throaty Jamaican accent and wide, sad eyes.

  “You’re awake,” she said, barely glancing at me.

  My head hurt. My mouth tasted of ashes and quicklime. I needed to pee, but there was a catheter in the way.

  “I think I want to see a doctor,” I managed.

  “Prob’ly you do,” Candice agreed. “And prob’ly you should. But our last resident went home yesterday. I can take the catheter out, if that’s what you want.”

  “There are no doctors?”

  “Home with their families like everybody else.” She fluffed my pillow. “Only us pathetic lonelyhearts left, Mr. Keller. You been unconscious ten days.”

  Later she wheeled me down the corridor—though I insisted I could have walked—to a lounge with a tall plateglass window, where the ward’s remaining patients had gathered to talk and weep and watch the fires that burned fitfully through the downtown core.

  Soziere’s curse. We become—or we make ourselves—less “likely.” But it’s not our own unlikeliness we perceive; instead, we see the world growing strange around us.

  The lights are out all over the city. The hospital, fortunately, has its own generator. I tried to call Deirdre from a hospital phone, but there was no dial tone, just a crackling hiss, like the last groove in an LP record.

  The previous week’s newspapers, stacked by the door of the hospital lounge, were dwindling broadsheets containing nothing but stark outlines of the impending gamma-ray disaster.

  The extraterrestrial warning had been timely. Timely, though we read it far too late. Apparently it not only identified the threatening binary neutron stars—which were spiraling at last into gaudy destruction, about to emit a burst of radiation brighter than a billion galaxies—but provided a calculable time scale.

  A countdown, in other words, which had already closed in on its ultimate zero. Too close to home, a black hole was about to be born.

  None of us would survive that last flash of annihilating fire.

  Or, at least, if we did, we would all become extremely unlikely.

  I remember a spot of blue luminescence roughly the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length, suspended above the burning city: Cherenkov radiation. Gamma rays fractured molecules in the upper atmosphere, loading the air with nitric oxides the color of d
ry blood. The sky was frying like a bad picture tube.

  The hard, ionizing radiation would arrive within hours. Cosmic rays striking the wounded atmosphere would trigger particle cascades, washing the crust of the Earth with what the papers called “high-energy muons.”

  I was tired of the ward lounge, the incessant weeping and periodic shouting.

  Candice took me aside. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “what I told the others. I been into the medicine cupboard. If you don’t want to wait, there are pills you can take.”

  The air smelled suddenly of burning plastic. Static electricity drew bright blue sparks from metal shelves and gurney carts. Surely this would be the end: the irrevocable death, the utter annihilation, if there can ever be an end.

  I told Candice a nightcap might be a good idea, and she smiled wanly and brought me the pills.

  3.

  They want me to keep on with my memoirs.

  They take the pages away from me, exchange them for greater rations of food.

  The food is pale, chalky, with the claylike texture of goat cheese. They excrete it from a sort of spinerette, white obscene lumps of it, like turds.

  I prefer to think of them as advanced machines rather than biological entities—vending machines, say, not the eight-foot-long centipedes they appear to be.

  They’ve mastered the English language. (I don’t know how.) They say “please” and “thank you.” Their voices are thin and reedy, a sound like tree branches creaking on a windy winter night.

  They tell me I’ve been dead for ten thousand years.

  Today they let me out of my bubble, let me walk outside, with a sort of mirrored umbrella to protect me from the undiluted sunlight.

  The sunlight is intense, the air cold and thin. They have explained, in patient but barely intelligible whispers, that the gamma ray burst and subsequent bath of cosmic radiation stripped the earth of its ozone layer as well as much of the upper atmosphere. The oxygen that remains, they say, is “fossil” oxygen, no longer replenished. The soil is alive with radioactive nuclei: samarium 146, iodine 129, isotopes of lead, of plutonium.

  There is no macroscopic life on Earth. Present company excepted.

  Everything died. People, plants, plankton, everything but the bacteria inhabiting the rocks of the deep mantle or the scalding water around undersea volcanic vents. The surface of the planet—here, at least—has been scoured by wind and radiation into a rocky desert.

  All this happened ten thousand years ago. The sun shines placidly on the lifeless soil, the distant blue-black mountains.

  Everything I loved is dead.

  I can’t imagine the technology they used to resurrect me, to recreate me, as they insist, from desiccated fragments of biological tissue tweezed from rocks. It’s not just my DNA they have recovered but (apparently, somehow) my memories, my self, my consciousness.

  I suppose Carl Soziere wouldn’t be surprised.

  I ask about others, other survivors reclaimed from the waterless desert. My captors (or saviors) only spindle their sickeningly mobile bodies: a gesture of negation, I’ve come to understand, the equivalent of a shake of the head. There are no other survivors.

  And yet I can’t help wondering whether Lorraine waits to be salvaged from her grave—some holographic scrap of her, at least; information scattered by time, like the dust of an ancient book.

  There is nothing in my transparent cell but bowls of water and food, a floor soft enough to serve as a mattress, and the blunted writing instruments and clothlike paper. (Are they afraid I might commit suicide?)

  The memoirs run out. I want the extra food, and I enjoy the diversion of writing, but what remains to be said? And to whom?

  Lately I’ve learned to distinguish between my captors.

  The “leader” (that is, the individual most likely to address me directly and see that others attend to my needs) is a duller shade of silver-white, his cartilaginous shell dusted with fine powder. He (or she) possesses many orifices, all visible when he sways back to speak. I have identified his speaking orifice and his food-excreting orifice, but there are three others I haven’t seen in use, including a tooth-lined maw that must be a kind of mouth.

  “We are the ones who warned you,” he tells me. “For half of a million years we warned you. If you had known, you might have protected yourself.” His grammar is impeccable, to my ears anyway, although consonants in close proximity make him stumble and hiss. “You might have deconstructed your moon, created a shield, as we did. Numerous strategies might have succeeded in preserving your world.”

  The tocsin had sounded, in other words, for centuries. We had simply been too dull to interpret it, until the very end, when nothing could be done to counter the threat.

  I try not to interpret this as a rebuke.

  “Now we have learned to transsect distance,” the insectile creature explains. “Then, we could only signal.”

  I ask whether he could re-create the Earth, revive the dead.

  “No,” he says. Perhaps the angle of his body signifies regret. “One of you is puzzle enough.”

  They live apart from me, in an immense silver half-sphere embedded in the alkaline soil. Their spaceship?

  For a day they haven’t come. I sit alone in my own much smaller shelter, its bubble walls polarized to filter the light but transparent enough to show the horizon with vicious clarity. I feel abandoned, a fly on a vast pane of dusty glass. And hungry. And thirsty.

  They return—apologetically—with water, with paper and writing implements, and with a generous supply of food, thoughtfully pre-excreted.

  They are compiling, they tell me, a sort of interstellar database, combining the functions of library, archeological museum, and telephone exchange. They are most grateful for my writings, which have been enthusiastically received. “Your cosmology,” by which they must mean Soziere’s cosmology, “is quite distinctive.”

  I thank them but explain that there is nothing more to write—and no audience I can even begin to imagine.

  The news perplexes them. The leader asks, “Do you need a human audience?”

  Yes. Yes, that’s what I need. A human audience. Lorraine, warning me away from despair, or even Deirdre, trying vainly to shield me from black magic.

  They confer for another day.

  I walk outside my bubble at sunset, alone, with my silver umbrella tilted toward the western horizon. When the stars appear, they are astonishingly bright and crisp. I can see the frosted breath of the Milky Way.

  “We cannot create a human audience for you,” the leader says, swaying in a chill noon breeze like a stately elm. “But there is perhaps a way.”

  I wait. I am infinitely patient.

  “We have experimented with time,” the creature announces. Or I think the word is “experimented.” It might as easily have been the clacking buzz of a cricket or a cicada.

  “Send me back,” I demand at once.

  “No, not you, not physical objects. It cannot be done. Thoughts, perhaps. Dreams. Speaking to minds long dead. Of course, it changes nothing.”

  I rather like the idea, when they explain it, of my memoirs circulating through the Terrestrial past, appearing fragmented and unintelligible among the night terrors of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Roman slaves, Chinese peasants, science fiction writers, drunken poets. And Deirdre Frank, and Oscar Ziegler. And Lorraine.

  Even the faintest touch—belated, impossible—is better than none at all.

  But still. I find it difficult to write.

  “In that case,” the leader says, “we would like to salvage you.”

  “Salvage me?”

  They consult in their own woody, windy language, punctuated by long silences or sounds I cannot hear.

  “Preserve you,” they conclude. “Yourself. Your soul.”

  And how would they do that?

  “I would take you into my body,” the leader says.

  Eat me, in other words. They have explained this more than once. Devour my
body, hoc est corpus, and spit out my soul like a cherry pit into the great galactic telephone exchange.

  “But this is how we must do it,” the leader says apologetically.

  I don’t fear them.

  I take a long last walk, at night, bundled against the cold in layers of flexible foil. The stars have not changed visibly in the ten thousand years of my absence, but there is nothing else familiar, no recognizable landmarks, I gather, anywhere on the surface of the planet. This might be an empty lake bed, this desert of mine, saline and ancient and, save for the distant mountains, flat as a chessboard.

  I don’t fear them. They might be lying, I know, although I doubt it; surely not even the most alien of creatures would travel hundreds of light years to a dead planet in search of a single exotic snack.

  I do fear their teeth, however, sharp as shark’s teeth, even if (as they claim) their bodies secrete an anesthetic and euphoriant venom.

  And death?

  I don’t fear death.

  I dread the absence of it.

  Maybe Soziere was wrong. Maybe there’s a teleological escape clause, maybe all the frayed threads of time will be woven back together at the end of the world, assembled in the ultimate library, where all the books and all the dreams are preserved and ordered in their multiple infinities.

  Or not.

  I think, at last, of Lorraine: really think of her, I mean; imagine her next to me, whispering that I ought to have taken her advice, not lodged this grief so close to my heart; whispering that death is not a door through which I can follow her, no matter how hard or how often I try.…

  “Will you accept me?” the leader asks, rearing up to show his needled mouth, his venom sacs oozing a pleasant narcotic.

  “I’ve accepted worse,” I tell him.

  PEARL BABY

  The first cramp hit her just ten minutes before Nick Lavin was due to arrive with his daughter Persey. Deirdre ignored it. She didn’t want to be sick right now. She hadn’t seen Nick for more than five years and she wanted to make a good impression. So she hung stoically over the rusty basin of the bathroom sink, wondering whether she would vomit, while her belly knotted in long, dry peristaltic waves.