The Perseids and Other Stories (6 page)

I discussed it, while the party ran down, with the only guest older than I was, a graying science fiction writer who had been hitting the pipe with a certain bleak determination. “

The Oort cloud,” he declared, “that’s where they are. I mean, why bother with planets? For dedicated space technologies—and I assume they would send machines, not something as short-lived and finicky as a biological organism—a planet’s not a really attractive place. Planets are heavy, corrosive, too hot for superconductors. Interesting places, maybe, because planets are where cultures grow, and why slog across all those light years unless you’re looking for something as complex and unpredictable as a sentient culture? But you don’t, for God’s sake, fill up their sky with spaceships. You stick around the Oort cloud, where it’s nice and cold and there are cometary bodies to draw resources from. You hang out, you listen. If you want to talk, you pick your own time.”The Oort cloud is that nebulous ring around the solar system, well beyond the orbit of Pluto, composed of small bodies of dust and water ice. Gravitational perturbation periodically knocks a few of these bodies into elliptical orbits; traversing the inner solar system, they become comets. Our annual meteor showers—the Perseids, the Geminids, the Quadrantids—are the remnants of ancient, fractured comets. Oort cloud visitors, old beyond memory.

But in light of Roger’s thesis I wondered if the question was too narrowly posed, the science fiction writer’s answer too pat. Maybe our neighbours had already arrived, not in silver ships but in metaphysics, informing the very construction and representation of our lives. The cave paintings at Lascaux, Chartres Cathedral, the Fox Broadcasting System: not their physicality (and they become less physical as our technology advances) but their intangible
grammar
—maybe this is the evidence they left us, a ruined archeology of cognition, invisible because pervasive,
inescapable: they are both here, in other words, and not here; they are us and not-us.

When the last guest was gone, the last dish stacked, Robin pulled off her shirt and walked through the apartment, coolly unself-conscious, turning off lights.

The heat of the party lingered. She opened the bedroom window to let in a breeze from the lakeshore. It was past two in the morning and the city was relatively quiet. I paid attention to the sounds she made, the rustle as she stepped out of her skirt, the easing of springs in the thrift-shop bed. She wore a ring through each nipple, delicate turquoise rings that gave back glimmers of ambient light. I remembered how unfamiliar her piercings had seemed the first time I encountered them with my tongue, the polished circles, their chilly, perfect geometry set against the warmer and more complex terrain of breast and aureole.

We made love in that distracted after-a-party way, while the room was still alive with the musk of the crowd, feeling like exhibitionists (I think she felt that way too) even though we were alone.

It was afterward, in a round of sleepy pillow talk, that she told me Roger had been her lover. I put a finger gently through one of her rings and she said Roger had piercings, too: one nipple and under the scrotum, penetrating the area between the testicles and the anus. Some men had the head of the penis pierced (a “Prince Albert”) but Roger hadn’t gone for that.

I was jealous. Jealous, I suppose, of this extra dimension of intimacy from which I was excluded. I had no wounds to show her.

She said, “You never talk about your divorce.”

“It’s not much fun to talk about.”

“You left Carolyn, or she left you?”

“It’s not that simple. But, ultimately, I guess she left me.”

“Lots of fighting?”

“No fighting.”

“What, then?”I thought about it. “Continental drift.”

“What was her problem?”

“I’m not so sure it was her problem.”

“She must have had a reason, though—or thought she did.”

“She said I was never there.” Robin waited patiently. I went on, “Even when I was with her, I was never
there
—or so she claimed. I’m not sure I know what she meant. I suppose, that I wasn’t completely engaged. That I was apart. Held back. With her, with her friends, with her family—with anybody.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

It was a question I’d asked myself too often.

Sure, in a sense it was true. I’m one of those people who are often called loners. Crowds don’t have much allure for me. I don’t confide easily and I don’t have many friends.

That much I would admit to. The idea (which had come to obsess Carolyn during our divorce) that I was congenitally, hopelessly
set apart
, a kind of pariah dog, incapable of real intimacy … that was a whole ‘nother thing.

We talked it around. Robin was solemn in the dark, propped on one elbow. Through the window, past the halo of her hair, I could see the setting moon. Far away down the dark street someone laughed.

Robin, who had studied a little anthropology, liked to see things in evolutionary terms. “You have a night watch personality,” she decided, closing her eyes.

“Night watch?”

“Mm-hm. Primates … you know … protohominids … it’s where all our personality styles come from. We’re social animals, basically, but the group is more versatile if you have maybe a couple of hyperthymic types for cheerleaders, some dysthymics to sit home and mumble, and the one guy—let’s say,
you
—who edges away from the crowd, who sits up when everybody else is asleep, who basically keeps the watches of the night. The one who sees the lions coming. Good night vision and lousy social skills. Every tribe should have one.”

“Is that what I am?”

“It’s reassuring, actually.” She patted my ass and said, “Keep watch for me, okay?”

I kept the watch a few minutes more.

In the morning, on the way to lunch, we visited one of those East Indian/West Indian shops, the kind with the impossibly gaudy portraits of Shiva and Ganesh in chrome-flash plastic frames, a cooler full of ginger beer and coconut pop, shelves of sandalwood incense and patchouli oil and bottles of magic potions (Robin pointed them out): St. John Conqueror Root, Ghost Away, Luck Finder, with labels claiming the contents were an Excellent Floor Polish, which I suppose made them legal to sell. Robin was delighted: “Flotsam from the gnososphere,” she laughed, and it was easy to imagine one of Roger’s gnostic creatures made manifest in this shop—for that matter, in this city, this English-speaking, Cantonese-speaking, Urdu-speaking, Farsi-speaking city—a slouching, ethereal beast of which one cell might be Ganesh the Elephant-headed Boy and another Madonna, the Cone-breasted Woman.

A city, for obvious reasons, is a lousy place to do astronomy. I worked the ’scope from the back deck of my apartment, shielded from streetlights, and Robin gave me a selection of broadband lens filters to cut the urban scatter. But I was interested in deep-sky observing and I knew I wasn’t getting everything I’d paid for.

In October I arranged to truck the ’scope up north for a weekend. Robin reserved us a cabin at a private campground near Algonquin Park. It was way past tourist season, but Robin knew the woman who owned the property; we would have the place virtually to ourselves and we could cancel, no problem, if the weather didn’t look right.

But the weather cooperated. It was the end of the month—coincidentally, the weekend of the Orionid meteor shower—and we were in the middle of a clean high-pressure cell that stretched from Alberta to Labrador. The air was brisk but cloudless, transparent as creek water. We arrived at the campsite Friday afternoon and I spent a couple of hours setting up the ’scope, calibrating it, and running an extension cord out to the automatic guider. I attached a thirty-five-millimeter SLR camera loaded
with hypersensitized Tech Pan film, and I did all this despite the accompaniment of the owner’s five barking Yorkshire Terrier pups. The ground under my feet was glacier-scarred Laurentian Shield rock; the meadow I set up in was broad and flat; highway lights were pale and distant. Perfect. By the time I finished setting up, it was dusk. Robin had started a fire in the pit outside our cabin and was roasting chicken and bell peppers. The cabin overlooked a marshy lake thick with duckweed; the air was cool and moist and I fretted about ground mist.

But the night was clear. After dinner Robin smoked marijuana in a tiny carved soapstone pipe (I didn’t) and then we went out to the meadow, bundled in winter jackets.

I worked the ’scope. Robin wouldn’t look through the eyepiece—her old phobia—but took a great, grinning pleasure in the Orionids, exclaiming at each brief etching of the cave-dark, star-scattered sky. Her laughter was almost giddy.

After a time, though, she complained of the cold, and I sent her back to the cabin (we had borrowed a space heater from the owner) and told her to get some sleep. I was cold, too, but intoxicated by the sky. It was my first attempt at deep-sky photography and surprisingly successful: when the photos were developed later that week I had a clean, hard shot of M100 in Coma Berenices, a spiral galaxy in full disk, arms sweeping toward the bright center; a city of stars beyond counting, alive, perhaps, with civilizations, so impossibly distant that the photons hoarded by the lens of the telescope were already millions of years old.

When I finally came to bed Robin was asleep under two quilted blankets. She stirred at my pressure on the mattress and turned to me, opened her eyes briefly, then folded her cinnamon-scented warmth against my chest, and I lay awake smelling the hot coils of the space heater and the faint pungency of the marijuana she had smoked and the pine-resinous air that had swept in behind me, these night odors mysteriously familiar, intimate as memory.

We made love in the morning, lazy and a little tired, and I thought there was something new in the way she looked at me,
a certain calculating distance, but I wasn’t sure; it might have been the slant of light through the dusty window. In the afternoon we hiked out to a wild blueberry patch she knew about, but the season was over; frost had shriveled the last of the berries. (The Yorkshire Terriers were at our heels, there and back.)

That night was much the same as the first except that Robin decided to stay back at the cabin reading an Anne Rice novel. I remembered that her father was an amateur astronomer and wondered if the parallel wasn’t a little unsettling for her, a symbolic incest. I photographed M33 in Triangulum, another elliptical galaxy, its arms luminous with stars, and in the morning we packed up the telescope and began the long drive south.

She was moodier than usual. In the cabin of the van, huddled by the passenger door with her knees against her chest, she said, “We never talk about relationship things.”

“Relationship things?”

“For instance, monogamy.”

That hung in the air for a while.

Then she said, “Do you believe in it?

“I said it didn’t really matter whether I “believed in” it; it just seemed to be something I did. I had never been unfaithful to Carolyn, unless you counted Robin; I had never been unfaithful to Robin.

But she was twenty-five years old and hadn’t taken the measure of these things. “I think it’s a sexual preference,” she said. “Some people are, some people aren’t.”

I said—carefully neutral—“Where do you stand?”

“I don’t know.” She gazed out the window at October farms, brown fields, wind-canted barns. “I haven’t decided.”

We left it at that.

She threw a Halloween party, costumes optional—I wore street clothes, but most of her crowd welcomed the opportunity to dress up. Strange hair and body paint, mainly. Roger (I had learned his last name: Roger Russo) showed up wearing a feathered headdress, green dye, kohl circles around his eyes. He said he was Sacha Runa, the jungle spirit of the Peruvian ayahuas
queros. Robin said he had been investigating the idea of shamanic spirit creatures as the first entities cohabiting the gnososphere: she thought the costume was perfect for him. She hugged him carefully and pecked his green-dyed cheek, merely friendly, but he glanced reflexively at me and quickly away, as if to confirm that I had seen her touch him.

I had one of my photographs of the galaxy M33 enlarged and framed; I gave it to Robin as a gift.

She hung it in her bedroom. I remember—it might have been November, maybe as late as the Leonids, mid-month—a night when she stared at it while we made love: she on her knees on the bed, head upturned, raw-cut hair darkly stubbled on her scalp, and me behind her, gripping her thin, almost fragile hips, knowing she was looking at the stars.

Three optical illusions:

(1) Retinal floaters. Those delicate, crystalline motes, like rainbow-colored diatoms, that swim through the field of vision.

Some nights, when I’ve been too long at the scope, I see them drifting up from the horizon, a terrestrial commerce with the sky.

(2) In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped what he believed were the canals of Mars. Mars has no canals; it is an airless desert. But for decades the educated world believed in a decadent Martian civilization, doomed to extinction when its water evaporated to the frigid poles.

It was Schiaparelli who first suggested that meteor showers represent the remains of ancient, shattered comets.