The Perseids and Other Stories (19 page)

“Do you suppose that’s how Ulysses sees
us?”

I shrugged. “In his terms, maybe.”

“Clearly not. Show me the cat who believes he lives in the midst of superior beings. Nonsense. Bullshit. In point of fact, Ulysses doesn’t find us in the least frightening or intimidating—we’re far less scary than the Doberman down the block. And why would a cat consider us
superior
when in all the things that matter to cat-kind—chasing and killing things and fucking and establishing territory—we’re barely capable?”

Leah, who had contributed nothing to the conversation up to this point, said: “But we
do
chase and kill things. As a species. We’re incredibly good at it, actually.”

“Certainly, but it all takes place in a realm Ulysses can’t penetrate or comprehend. And that’s the point. Ninety percent of what we consider vitally important is, to Ulysses, either imperceptible or completely trivial.”

I tried to sort this out. “You’re saying a superior being wouldn’t be
obviously
superior.”

He grinned. “Exactly. The opposite, in fact. As far as Ulysses is concerned, Leah and I are actually more catlike than the other creatures he encounters. We groom him; we feed him. We’re about as unpreposessing, in his eyes, as that sofa you’re sitting on.”

“Okay,” I said, “and this means…?”

“Well, to draw the most vulgar inference first, it means the Superior Being could be walking among us today and not attracting attention.”

Leah shook her head. “Not necessarily. We’re reasoning beings, which Ulysses isn’t. We would know.”

“Ulysses reasons all the time. He figured out how to spring the latch on the pantry, remember?”

“But,” Leah insisted, “he doesn’t
know
he reasons.”

“Is that important? Maybe we really are the pearl of evolution and there is nothing that can outthink or outperceive us—maybe sentience has a ceiling, and we’ve reached it. But maybe not. We can at least consider the alternative.”

“Well,” Leah conceded darkly, “it’s not like it matters or anything.”

Paul ignored her. I said, “If this being exists, and if he’s essentially imperceptible, Leah’s right. It doesn’t matter; it
can’t
matter.”

“Except for two things,” Paul said. “Artifacts and sleight of hand.”

Could Paul have found out about Leah and I? Had she said something to him? It was at least possible. Paul was capable of many things, perhaps even of maintaining this glib insouciance while plotting to stab me with a pickle fork.

But it hardly seemed likely.

I looked at Leah, feeling a rush of warmth that was hard to conceal. I thought I loved her. Yes,
that
word. It had occured to me only lately that I loved Leah Bridger, though we had flirted for years and I had always liked her immensely. She was, I thought, a little martyred by her marriage; she cared for Paul, but their relationship hadn’t evolved the way she’d hoped. He was too self-sufficient to really love anyone. She delighted him—he made that plain enough—but delight isn’t love.

Leah owned a degree in visual arts but had never worked outside the home. That was Paul’s preference. And she had kept her figure; that was Paul’s preference, too, I think. Once, years ago, he had told me he liked women “underfed and underfoot.”
(When I ragged him about the gross incorrectness of this he smiled innocently but never repeated the phrase. At least not in my presence.)

So my ambitions may not have been especially noble, but I wasn’t here just to get laid, either. I
did
care about Leah. I had been telling myself so on a daily basis.

I looked at her, trying to shoot a warmth-and-comfort vibe across the room. She regarded me distantly and lit a cigarette.

Leah had stopped smoking in 1987.1 remembered the ordeal. When had she started again?

She waved out a match and exhaled a blue halo of smoke. Paul wrinkled his nose.

“Artifacts?” I said. “Sleight of hand?”

“Here’s the question. When, if ever, does Ulysses suspect that human beings are more than they seem? When does our uniqueness impinge on
him
in some way?”

“When we talk about having him put down,” Leah said.

Paul looked hurt. “No, and anyway we wouldn’t do a thing like that. Shame on you. No, but he gets freaked out by our artifacts once in a while. You remember your Sylvester slippers?”

Leah had gotten a pair of slippers one Christmas (a gift from some demented uncle) in the likeness of Sylvester the Cat. Big rolling plush-toy eyes, black fur, nylon whiskers.

Paul turned to me. “Ulysses could not
abide
those slippers. It was as if Leah’s feet had been taken over by aliens. His fur would bristle; he’d growl and arch his back. We had to throw the slippers out, and it still took him a good day to settle down. We—human beings—had manufactured an artifact that sent all the wrong cat signals. Ulysses’ experience of a higher being is therefore an experience of the
unnatural
, the eerie.

“Likewise sleight of hand. When Ulysses was a kitten, I would roll a rubber ball for him to chase. Great game. He loved it. Except when I cupped the ball in my hand and
pretended
to throw it. He’d jump up, follow the trajectory, and—no ball! Hey, presto! It’s a trick that wouldn’t fool a two-year-old more than once, but Ulysses always fell for it. And it bothered him. You
could tell. He’d let out this quizzical little mewling sound and scratch at the carpet.”

“So,” I said, “the only evidence we would have of a Superior Being would be things that make us feel… quizzical?”

“Things that aren’t natural,” Leah interpreted. Her voice was cold. The cat emitted another yowl from some far-off room of the house. “Things that make the hair on your neck stand up.”

“Arm,” I said.

She frowned. “What?”

“People always say, ‘The hair on your neck.’ I mean, I know the feeling. But it’s the hair on my arms that prickles. Not the neck.”

Paul looked at me as if he forgave this unfortunate descent into trivia. (Nevertheless, it’s something I’ve noticed about myself. A good campfire story makes the hair on my arms stand at attention. This was explained to me once: something about the arrector pili muscles and the fight-or-flight reflex.)

Leah gave Paul a long evaluating stare. “Why don’t you just show him the rock?”

Paul went off to rummage in his study (presumably for “the rock”) while Leah poured herself yet another drink. I waylaid her in the kitchen. It was one of those chrome kitchens, all mirror surfaces. Our reflections glared back at us from a dozen angles.

I put my hands on her shoulders. She said, “Matthew, don’t.”

I backed off and looked, I guess, hurt.

We may not have been lovers, but we had known each other a long time. The unspoken question was obvious and I didn’t have to ask it.

She looked briefly ashamed. “There’s nothing between us, you know, but a little loneliness.”

“It could be more.”

She shook her head firmly. “No, Matthew. No, it couldn’t. People like us, we’re like shadows orbiting a vacuum. We have nothing to give each other.”

I was too hurt to react sensibly. “How very Sylvia Plath,” I said.

Which made her angry. “Fuck you,” she muttered. I went back to the living room.

“It
is
a rock,” I said.

Paul was holding it in his hand. The rock was about the size of a potato. “I told you so.”

“You told me you dug it out of the garden, too, but I assumed that was some kind of metaphor.”

“There you have me, Matthew. No, I didn’t literally dig it out of the garden, though it looks just about that prosaic, doesn’t it? I bought it at Finders, as a matter of fact. As a paperweight.”

Finders was the name of a run-down secondhand bookshop near the University. Paul loved the place. I had been there, but it didn’t impress me. It offered a few blowsy first editions, a big section of occult nonsense in the Madame Blavatsky tradition, forgotten junk novels from the fifties. And a little knickknack shelf cluttered with fake Wedgwood and cracked china dolls and Victorian mirrors and, evidently, rocks. I said, “You bought a
rock?”

“It’s a scrying rock.”

It was a smooth lump of whatever it is commonplace rocks are made of, lusterless gray with a few chunks of quartz randomly embedded. “You paid money for this?”

“Don’t be facetious. I got change back from a dollar. But the appearance of the artifact is consistent with our thesis, Matthew. Ulysses, for instance, has no way of distinguishing a man-made object from a natural object. The distinction between a rubber ball and a pebble is not
categorical
, in the cat’s mind. Both are round; one is hard and one is soft; they have distinguishing smells, and so on, but as for their purpose or provenance—he can’t even phrase the question.”

“So the artifact of a Superior Being might look to us like a fucking
rock?”

“As well a rock as something else. The point is, what makes
this
rock special would be instantly obvious to our Superior Being and vague, at best, to the rest of us.”

I said, “Vague if not imaginary. My arm hairs aren’t standing up, Paul.”

He smiled benignly and said, “Hold it in your hand.”

I understand about the power of suggestion.

It was a moonlit night in autumn. Ulysses was wailing like a lost soul, and something out there in the dark was answering him. Leah had turned away from me for no apparent reason. And Paul insisted on ghost stories.

But it had stopped being frightening. The evening had grown tedious and bitter and I wanted to leave. Why stay?

I took the rock in my hand.

It was not warm. It did not radiate a strange electricity.

“Hold it a while,” Paul said. “Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes and heard Paul settling into his chair, Leah bumping around in the kitchen, Ulysses walking the stations of his discontent. No more. No dreamlike images sprang to mind. No unusual sensations, only the usual minor discomforts. (I had cinched my belt a notch too tight in an effort to impress Leah with my youthful waistline. My shoes pinched.)

Given that Paul’s exegesis had lead up to this stunning anticlimax, I let my thoughts drift to Leah.

Had her drinking become a problem? She had always had a thing for what we euphemistically call “substances,” including an expensive cocaine habit when that was still fashionable. Much of this I had put down to her unhappiness with Paul, from which I had lately longed to rescue her… but some of it must have been intrinsic to her nature, some unacknowledged and unProzac’d darkness out of her childhood. There are people for whom unhappiness is a default state. Maybe Leah had stayed with Paul all these years because with Paul she could
be functionally
unhappy. He made room for her depression. He tolerated it. Indulged it. Remained impervious to it. He was, above all else, reliable.

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.”