The Perseids and Other Stories (27 page)

Nick took the joint to the open window so the warm July breeze would draw away the smoke. Persey might come back upstairs at any moment. “We used to hide this from our parents,” he said. “Now we hide it from our kids.”

“As a rule,” Deirdre said, “I don’t hide it.”

Nick inhaled cautiously but deeply. A plume of white smoke rose past the hanging dream-catcher and out into the wide world. “Tastes peculiar.”

“It’s one of the new strains. Some hybrid Dutch Indica, supposedly.”

“Whoa,” he said. “Enough of
that.
I have to drive.”

Deirdre took the joint from him, and for one pellucid moment she was aware of his uneasiness, the way he avoided her eyes.

He was uncomfortable with what she had become, what he had once felt about her.

She thought,
I embarrass him.

Fresh pain coiled in her belly.

Persephone surprised Deirdre by coming upstairs with a recent book about Martian nanofossils, the hints of ancient life lately discovered in an Antarctic meteorite. “Persey sees herself as a biologist,” Nick said. Not
wants to be
but
sees herself as
, trivializing the ambition. Persey winced faintly and shot her father a look. It was the first hint of family discord Deirdre had seen, evidence perhaps of some deeper, buried rift.

“Smart choice,” Deirdre said. “Everything is… you know… older than it seems.” Which meant what? The pain was distracting her.

She ushered Nick and Persephone to the door, told Nick how great it was to see him, told him not to be a stranger, told Persey it was really nice meeting her. When they were gone the store seemed suddenly cavernous. She locked up front and back and retired upstairs, taking the steps slowly because she hurt again. Hurt worse than before. She rummaged through the bathroom cabinet until she found the old bottle of Percodan left over from her gallbladder operation. She popped one, then two, then—for insurance—a third.

And so to bed.

The pain woke her sometime in the quiet hours before dawn. She came out of a claustrophobic dream nauseated with pain and vaguely aware that the mattress under her thighs was slick and warm.
My period
, she thought vaguely, but it had been years since her last menstrual flow. She groped for the switch on the lamp beside her bed, threw back the bedsheet and saw blood.

Then more pain, cruel hot blades of it. She bit back a cry and hunched to the bathroom, where she ate four more Percodan and promptly fell to the floor, weak with shock. The blood between her legs was only a trickle, but the pain… the pain rose in a great swelling crescendo, and this time she screamed, and the pain clamped her peritoneal muscles impossibly tight, and her legs arched, and she delivered
something.
…

Something she didn’t want to see.

She wanted to sleep. To faint. To die. But she didn’t. Already the pain had begun to abate; and without looking at the thing on the tiled floor she was able to raise herself up, strip off her soiled nightgown, wad some toilet paper between her legs to serve as a pad. She was dizzy, confused. Should she call 911? Probably—almost certainly—she should, but she didn’t want to, couldn’t face the humiliation of an army of helpful paramedics, would rather die, if she must, though the bleeding had stopped short of outright hemhorrhage. She could see a doctor in the morning, after she cleaned up, after she came to terms with this awful thing, this midnight delivery of, of
what?
A blood clot, a tumor? She let her eyes creep toward the dark mass on the floor.

She could not have been pregnant, unless it was some weird parthenogenic pregnancy, so this blood-drenched mass must be a token of disease, probably something advanced and eventually deadly, like the ovarian cancer that had killed her mother forty years ago. God, she thought,
look
at it. In her mind’s eye she had pictured some mutant abortion, some crudely human cut of meat, but the reality was in fact much less disgusting. The lump was about the size and shape of a lemon, and under the skein of adhesive blood it looked white,
shiny
white, white as a button.

As if, Deirdre thought wildly, I had fucked an elephant tusk and delivered a cue ball.

“Sick,” she muttered to herself.

She touched the mass with her toe. It was heavy. It rolled to one side. It made a clinking sound against the ceramic tile.

“Oh,” she said out loud, “oh, this is too much. Too much.”

She washed her hands. She dampened a washcloth and dabbed the blood off her thighs, her legs, the bathroom floor. At last—tentatively, cautiously—she bent over the tumorous white lump, picked it up and dropped it into the sink under the rushing warm water. Blood swirled into the basin and down the drain. She ran the water until the water ran red, then pink, then clean. The glittering white object sat in the rusty basin like a river rock. She had collected such rocks when she was little. Rocks worn smooth by water. Warmed by sunlight. The Percodan was kicking in.

The Percodan was kicking in big time, and Deirdre stumbled back to her bed. She retained barely enough presence of mind to peel away the stained sheets, not enough to redress the bare mattress. She simply fell onto it. Her eyes registered the first light of dawn past the window blind. She closed her eyes and made it dark again.

The secondhand bookstore Deirdre had inherited was called Finders, and the name had proved apt: she was always finding peculiar things.

Prior to moving in she had gone through the store and the apartment above it meticulously, exorcising the shade of Oscar Ziegler. Nice of the old man to drop this fossilized property in her lap, but she had, to tell the truth, never
liked
him. Not that he was hostile or angry; he had been too frail for that. But he radiated an old strangeness she might once have called “bad magic,” a contagious atmosphere of bleak resignation. So she had rented a van and trucked his stuff to the Goodwill drop-off, his ridiculous smoking jackets, his 78-rpm platters featuring Caruso and Dame Nellie Melba, his dozen matching copies of the crank book
You Will Never Die.
His jar of nineteenth-century Austrian coins. His Quaker quilt bedspread with hex signs woven into the pattern, yellow-stained. His perforated Oxford shoes and matching shoe trees. His silver-handled shaving brush and straight razor. His rack of tarry, stinking meerschaums.

Some of this kibble might have been worth money, but Deirdre didn’t care. The point was to get it out, to replace it with something clean, something new.

And still, a year later, evidence of Oscar Ziegler surfaced from time to time. From a cupboard long ago obstructed by bookcases: a rude wooden chess board, a child’s tattered cloth jacket with a copy of
The Time Machine and Other Stories
jammed into one pocket, a litter of strange glass needles of various colors.

She had found the subcellar just six months ago. The entrance was a hinged wooden door so obscured with dust that she had mistaken it for part of the basement wall. A narrow flight of stairs led down to an earthen-floored space roughly seven feet high by
fifteen wide. The room contained nothing but a rotted wooden shelf on which resided six sealed mason jars wrapped in dust as white as spider silk. One of the jars was labeled APPLE CHUTNEY OCT 3 ′99 in crabbed fountain-pen script. One hundred years of chutney. She threw the jars away.

A week later she braced the subcellar stairs, laid down a crude plank flooring, whitewashed the walls, and installed a grow light. She germinated a batch of British Columbia pot seeds (“Shiva Shanti X Northern Lights,” according to the mail-order ad) and transplanted them to fifteen-liter ice-cream buckets filled with potting soil, vermiculite, and shrimp compost. She installed a fan to circulate the air and she tended the plants three evenings a week. It had been a good crop. No whiteflies, no fungus gnats. The female buds had looked a little strange, gnarled and golden, as if she had overfertilized, but otherwise healthy and sticky with resin glands.

She had dried her first harvest carefully and stored the buds in a fresh set of mason jars. She resisted the temptation to make her own labels: BC ORGANIC INDICA AUG ’02.

Deirdre recovered quickly from the strange birth.

She stayed in bed for a day, didn’t eat, only limped to the kitchen for tall glasses of ice water. Finders was closed for the duration and that was okay with Deirdre. She felt no pain now, just a subsiding ache that was almost pleasant, a
healing
ache, she chose to think.

The next day she was up on her feet with a single Percodan and thinking more clearly.

She decided not to see a doctor. This was not the advice she would have given anyone else. But it felt right. Right for her, anyway. If the thing she had delivered was a tumor, then it was either benign or malignant. If malignant, it had surely already planted its seeds throughout her body. If benign, no problem.

But of course it wasn’t a tumor. She had never heard of a tumor as white and hard as that. And if it wasn’t a tumor, then it was a mystery. Bless me, Deirdre thought, I have made a pearl from a grain of sand.

She retrieved the thing from the bathroom sink, fighting her queasiness. But it was pleasant to the touch. It was warm, it was heavy, and it was as smooth as if it had been polished. It reflected the daylight from the window blinds in a bright miniature rectangle. If she looked at it closely she saw her own long-nosed reflection, just the way she used to see her reflection in Christmas-tree balls when she was a child.

Well, she thought, didn’t I hunt this all my life, this
strangeness?
Wasn’t it what she had looked for in blotter hits of LSD and in the collected works of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, in Vedanta Buddhism and in that fucking brown rice diet that had nearly killed her? People talked about “enlightenment,” but “enlightenment” was the wrong word. Really, it was the limits of the material world she had been hunting. The borders of reality, the place where is met
might be.

And here it was, Deirdre thought, and it had come to her in a way uniquely humiliating, appeared as an object she could neither understand nor discuss with others, and wasn’t that somehow appropriate? That her epiphany should be
unspeakable?

Three days later she noticed that the pearl baby had grown protruberances that resembled the stumps of arms and legs, and on the top a rounded nub that could have been a head.

The day after that, the pearl baby opened its shiny black eyes.

Persey wanted to be a marine biologist. Her great ambition was to work at the Woods Hole Océanographie Institute. At her last school she had taken two advanced courses in biology and was certain she could get into one of the good universities, especially if she improved her math.

She felt okay talking about this with Deirdre, she said, because Deirdre knew about science and didn’t think it was stupid.

Nick, Deirdre gathered, harbored the old contempt of the humanities people for the sciences. He dismissed her interests as “bugs and germs.” He didn’t actually, you know,
mind
it, Persey said, but he was obviously unimpressed. “I can’t talk about it to him, the way I can talk to you…. Uh, Deirdre? What’s that sound?”

Deirdre looked up sharply.

The sound was a staggered but somehow rhythmic knocking that came up through the joists of the building. It was louder than Deirdre had hoped, but she had prepared an explanation in case something like this happened.

“Raccoons,” she said. “They get up under the eaves of old buildings like this. Get into the space behind the wall and make nests. You see a lot of young ones this time of year.”

Raccoons moved at night, and it was night now, a blossomy summer night. A breeze lifted the curtains and cooled the kitchen air. The city roared distantly.

Persey looked both nervous and skeptical, but the knocking, thank God, stopped.

Nick had called Deirdre six weeks after his last visit. He said he’d been settling into his Bathurst Street apartment and had been too busy to get in touch, but it had been great seeing her and she ought to come for dinner sometime. And in the meantime he had a problem. He wasn’t comfortable leaving Persey by herself all evening, but he had a date, and Persey had been keen to go back to the bookstore anyhow, and he just thought… would it be okay?

Deirdre had bitten back her disappointment, because after all what had she expected? That he would be asking
her
for a date? (God, she thought, please tell me that wasn’t what I wanted.) Yeah, she said, sure, she’d be happy to see Persephone, and that at least was true enough.

Nick had dropped her off at seven. Persey had rummaged in the bookstore a bit, shared Kraft Dinner with Deirdre, watched a show on Deirdre’s tiny portable TV set. Was dismayed that Deirdre didn’t get Discovery or The Learning Channel. Deirdre played Boggle with her and won by a single point, but Persey was proud of finding SILICA and WASP (where Deirdre had found only WAS). Then they made tea and talked.

Nick had said he would be back by eleven to pick up his daughter. It was ten to midnight now.

“The oldest living things on Earth,” Persey was saying, “are called archaebacteria—or at least people
thought
they were the
oldest living things. But that’s the interesting part. There might be something older. Scientists have dug up these ancient rocks, or the Martian meteorite is another example, with what look like tiny fossils. The problem is, they’re
too
tiny. You need an electron microscope even to see them.”

“Why is that a problem, Persey?”

“Because you need a certain size just to contain a long enough fragment of DNA to reproduce. And these things are too small, even smaller than viruses. So if they’re a form of life, they’re
weird
life. Nobody knows how they work. Maybe they’re not even extinct. Some people think—”

Deirdre didn’t find out what some people think, because the telephone rang, startling her. She jumped out of her chair, almost spilled her tea.

The phone call was Nick.

“I know I’m late,” he said. “Things got a little complicated. I’m still out here in the fucking suburbs, Deirdre, and it occurred to me, even if I leave right now I’m still going to be an hour getting there, and by the time I get Persey home she’ll be exhausted…”