The Perseids and Other Stories (18 page)

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.

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.

It was always Leah who did hostess duty at the Bridger house, answering the door or the phone, serving drinks. Paul himself had long ago settled into a placid domesticity untroubled by such peasant chores. “He’s in the front room,” Leah whispered into my ear, and I gave her a quick embrace.

Which she did not enthusiastically return. When I tried to meet her eyes, she looked away.

“Close the door,” she said briskly. “Before Ulysses gets out.”

She had been drinking, I thought.

She took the wine bottle to the kitchen.

Leah had restrained her husband’s decorative instincts in the more public parts of the house. Here in the spacious front room, the only concessions to Paul’s eclecticism were a framed Hopi weaving of no particular merit or value, an audio system cobbled out of fifty-year-old black and chrome vacuum-tube components, and an African ritual mask that looked very
Bell, Book and Candle
against the textured buff-orange wall. As a decor statement, it announced Genteel Eccentricity Held Within Acceptable Bounds.

And here, in a large but fashionable easy chair, was Paul Bridger himself, smiling benignly.

I didn’t dislike Paul Bridger. My designs on Leah had nothing to do with Paul, or so I told myself. Paul and I had been friends since our undergraduate days. If I resented anything about Paul, it was that he had achieved virtually everything he wanted in life and had accepted this good fortune, not exactly arrogantly, but as his due… That is, yes, he
knew
he was lucky, and wasn’t it mildly amusing that so much had come his way so easily?

But then, he wasn’t exactly Bill Gates. His needs were simple and he satisfied them on a regular basis; he enjoyed a modest but secure tenure at the University of Toronto, which was exactly as it should be; a little family money made possible the amenities, such as this house. And he had married the perfect wife. Leah occasionally mentioned the possibility of children (forlornly), but that had never happened, probably because children wouldn’t have fit into Paul’s schematically ideal existence.

Does that make him sound boring—a Babbitt, a nebbish? Don’t be deceived. He had a quick and open mind and a grasp of history (both mainstream and off-trail) that made him a popular guest at faculty barbecues. And he loved to talk.

I said, “What have you got to show me?”

He smiled. “You know better than that, Matthew. There has to be an overture before the curtain goes up. Have a seat.”

I settled at the near end of the sofa, hoping Leah might join me there for a little illicit knee-touching. But when she came into the room she just offered aperitifs and wandered off again. She seemed preoccupied, abstracted.

Paul talked about the old days.

“I think about Ulysses sometimes,” Paul Bridger said.
“Leah?
Where is the old reprobate at the moment?”

Leah’s voice came from the kitchen but seemed much farther away. “I saw him up in the bedroom a little while ago. He was looking at the moon.”

Ulysses was Paul’s cat, ten years old, a fat mongrel (can you call a cat a mongrel?) with some Siamese in his ancestry. As if on cue, or maybe he heard his name, Ulysses came stalking through the room with his tail in the air. His fur was spotted with orange, his eyes were as green and bright as a go light—a patchwork quilt of a cat. “He’s nervous tonight,” Paul said. “All that ruckus outside,” meaning the female-animal-in-heat I had heard from the walk. “Ulysses is neutered, of course, but he knows something’s up, and it interests him.”

But Ulysses wasn’t allowed outside. Traffic on one side of the house, a ravine full of foxes and skunks on the other, bad news for an animal as thoroughly domesticated as Ulysses.

Ulysses padded through the hallway to the front door and yowled. Leah called “Hush!” from the kitchen, where she was still fixing food or sneaking a drink.

“Sometimes,” Paul said, “I look at Ulysses and think about those dormitory bull sessions we used to have. You remember that, Matthew?”

Of course I remembered that. I remembered sitting up often until dawn, Paul and I and a circle of friends in the dormitory commons, sorting out life, the universe, and everything. My parents were the kind who worried that I’d go to college and end up smoking fortified cigarettes and using words like “empowered” and “patriarchal,” and I had been perfectly happy to fulfill their
expectations. Those of us who reach middle age without children of our own are allowed to own up to these things. We call them fond memories.

“There was that engineering student,” Paul said, “remember Ken Schroeder? The one who read science fiction and was always going on about the next stage of evolution, the Superior Being…?”

Yes, and we had pilloried him for it. The
ubermensch:
it had seemed such a quaintly totalitarian notion, reeking of eugenics and Nordic Purity. Also, it was easy to make Schroeder blush. He had bad gums and dandruff. Homo superior, right. (I had actually run into Ken Schroeder a couple of months ago. He does industrial design for a major architectural firm now, pulls in a couple of hundred K a year. Balding, but his teeth are perfect.)

“Well,” Paul said, “I’ve been thinking about that off and on for, what is it, almost twenty-five years now? More often when I’m around Ulysses. Because it’s an interesting question, if you ask it the right way. Matthew, are you an animal-rights person?”

I shrugged. “I eat meat. I refrain from clubbing baby harp seals.”

“Because I don’t want to be misunderstood. If I say we are, as a species,
superior
to Ulysses and his kind, I’m not presuming a
moral
superiority. Human beings aren’t necessarily the crown of creation and Ulysses may not be a lesser creature than you or I, in the grand scheme of things. Still, there is indisputably a wide range of things we can do, as a species, that Ulysses can’t. Write poetry, map the stars, do calculus, build bridges. All of this is beyond the ken of our four-footed cousin, yes?”

“Granted.”

“So let’s reconsider the old dorm room debate. What if there was a creature superior to us in all the ways we are superior to Ulysses? Would we even know such a being existed?”

I didn’t really care. My appetite for this kind of sophomore philosophy had waned with middle age. What I wanted was some time with Leah. I needed to find out what had changed since Paul’s last party, when she had taken me into the cedar-scented
darkness back of the garden and kissed me and cried a little at the strangeness of her betrayal.

But she came in with a plate of carrot sticks and sour cream and sat listlessly in a dim corner of the room. She gave the window an uneasy look, then rose to draw the curtain against the moonlight.

Ulysses continued to complain of his confinement in eerie Siamese wails.

Paul wanted me to play along. I said, “I read all those stories, too. Somebody who can do higher math in his head, interpret Mozart, read minds. And gets to forgive brutal mankind its adolescent folly as he’s burned at the stake. Homo superior.
That
guy.”