The Perseids and Other Stories (7 page)

(3) Computer-generated three-dimensional pictures—they were everywhere that summer, a fad. You know the kind? The picture looks like so much visual hash, until you focus your eyes well beyond it; then the image lofts out, a hidden bas-relief: ether sculpture.

Robin believed TV worked the same way. “If you turn to a blank channel,” she told me (December: first snow outside the window), “you can see pictures in the static. Three-dee. And they move.

What kind of pictures?

“Strange.” She was clearly uncomfortable talking about it. “Kind of like animals. Or bugs. Lots of arms. The eyes are very … strange.” She gave me a shy look. “Am I crazy?”

“No.” Everyone has a soft spot or two. “You look at these pictures often?”

“Hardly ever. Frankly, it’s kind of scary. But it’s also….”

“What?”

“Tempting.”

I don’t own a television set. One summer Carolyn and I had taken a trip to Mexico and we had seen the famous murals at Teotihuacán. Disembodied eyes everywhere: plants with eyes for flowers, flowers exuding eyes, eyes floating through the convolute images like lost balloons. Whenever people talk about television, I’m reminded of Teotihuacán.

Like Robin, I was afraid to look through certain lenses for fear of what might be looking back.

That winter, I learned more about Roger Russo.

He was wealthy. At least, his family was wealthy. The family owned Russo Precision Parts, an electronics distributor with a near-monopoly of the Canadian manufacturing market. Roger’s older brother was the corporate heir-designate; Roger himself, I gather, was considered “creative” (i.e, unemployable) and allowed a generous annual remittance to do with as he pleased.

Early in January (the Quadrantids, but they were disappointing that year) Robin took me to Roger’s place. He lived in a house off Queen West—leased it from a cousin—a three-story brick Edwardian bastion in a Chinese neighborhood where the houses on each side had been painted cherry red. We trekked from the streetcar through fresh ankle-high snow; the snow was still falling, cold and granular. Robin had made the date: we were supposed to have lunch, the three of us. I think she liked bringing Roger and me together, liked those faint proprietary sparks that passed between us; I think it flattered her. Myself, I didn’t enjoy it. I doubted Roger took much pleasure in it, either.

He answered the door wearing nothing but jogging pants. His
solitary silver nipple ring dangled on his hairless chest; if reminded me (sorry) of a pull-tab on a soft drink can. He shooed us in and latched the door. Inside, the air was warm and moist.

The house was a shrine to his eccentricity: books everywhere, not only shelved but stacked in corners, an assortment too random to categorize, but I spotted early editions of William James (
Psychology
, the complete work) and Carl Jung; a ponderous hardcover
Phenomenology of the Mind
, Heidegger’s
Being and Time
, none of them books I had ever read or ever intended to read. We adjourned to a big wood-and-tile kitchen and made conversation while Roger chopped kohlrabi at a butcher-block counter. He had seen
Natural Born Killers
at a review theater and was impressed by it: “It’s completely post-post—a deconstruction of
itself—
very image-intensive and, you know, florid, like early church iconography….”

The talk went on like this. High-toned media gossip, basically. After lunch, I excused myself and hunted down the bathroom.

On the way back I paused at the kitchen door when I heard Roger mention my name.

“Michael’s not much of a watcher, is he?”

Robin: “Well, he is, actually—a certain kind of watcher.”

“Oh—the astronomy….”

“Yes.”

“That photograph you showed me.”

“Yes, right.”

That photograph
, I thought.
The one on her bedroom wall.

Later, in the winter-afternoon lull that softens outdoor sounds and amplifies the rumble of the furnace, Robin asked Roger to show me around the house. “The upstairs,” she said, and to me: “It’s so weird!”

“Thanks,” Roger said.

“You know what I mean! Don’t pretend to be insulted. Weird is your middle name.”

I followed Roger’s pale back up the narrow stairway, creaking risers lined with faded red carpet. Then, suddenly, we were in another world: a cavernous space—walls must have been
knocked out—crowded with electronic kibble. Video screens, raw circuit boards, ribbon wire snaking through the clutter like eels through a gloomy reef. He threw a wall switch, and it all came to life.

“A dozen cathode-ray tubes,” Roger said, “mostly yard-sale and electronic-jobber trash.” Some were black-and-white, some crenellated with noise bars. “Each one cycles through every channel you can get from satellite. I wired in my own decoder for the scrambled channels. The cycles are staggered, so mostly you get chaos, but every so often they fall into sync and for a split second the same image is all around you. I meant to install another dish, feed in another hundred channels, but the mixer would have been … complex. Anyway, I lost interest.”

“Not to sound like a Philistine,” I said, “but what is it—a work of art?”

Roger smiled loftily. “In a way. Actually, it was meant to be a ghost trap.”

“Ghost trap?”

“In the Hegelian sense. The
weltgeist.”

“Summoned from the gnososphere,” Robin added.

I asked about the music. The music had commenced when he threw the switch: a strange nasal melody, sometimes hummed, sometimes chanted, thick as incense. The words, when I could make them out, were foreign and punctuated with thick glottal stops. There were insect sounds in the background; I supposed it was a field recording, the kind of anthropological oddity a company called Nonesuch used to release on vinyl, years ago.

“It’s called an
icaro,”
Roger said. “A supernatural melody. Certain Peruvian Indians drink
ayahuasca
and produce these songs,
icaros.
They learn them from the spirit world.”

Ayahuasca
is a hallucinogenic potion made from a mixture of
Banisteriopsis caapi
vines and the leaves of
Psychotria viridis
, both rain-forest plants. (I spent a day at the Robarts looking it up.) Apparently it can be made from a variety of more common plant sources, and
ayahuasca
churches like the União
do Vegetal
have popularized its use in the urban centers of Brazil.

“And the third floor,” Robin said, waving at the stairs dimly
visible across the room, “that’s amazing, too. Roger built an addition over what used to be the roof of the building. There’s a greenhouse, an actual greenhouse! You can’t see it from the street because the facade hides it, but it’s huge. And there’s a big open-air deck. Show him, Roger.”

Roger shook his head: “I don’t think it’s necessary.”

We were about to leave the room when three of the video screens suddenly radiated the same image: waterfall and ferns in soft focus, and a pale woman in a white skirt standing beside a Datsun that matched her blue-green eyes. It snagged Roger’s attention. He stopped in his tracks.

“Rainha da Floresta,”
he murmured, looking from Robin to me and back again, his face obscure in the flickering light. “The lunar aspect.”

The winter sky performed its long procession. One clear night in February, hungry for starlight, I zipped myself into my parka and drove a little distance west of the city—not with the telescope but with a pair of 10×50 Zeiss binoculars. Hardly Mount Palomar, but not far removed from the simple optics Galileo ground for himself some few centuries ago.

I parked off an access road along the ridge top of Rattlesnake Point, with a clear view to the frozen rim of Lake Ontario. Sirius hung above the dark water, a little obscured by rising mist. Capella was high overhead, and to the west I was able to distinguish the faint oval of the Andromeda galaxy, two-million-odd light-years away. East, the sky was vague with city glare and etched by the running lights of airliners orbiting Pearson International.

Alone in the van, breathing steam and balancing the binoculars on the rim of a half-open window, I found myself thinking about the Fermi Paradox. They ought to be here … where are they?

The science fiction writer at Robin’s party had said they wouldn’t come in person. Organic life is too brief and too fragile for the eons-long journeys between stars. They would send machines. Maybe self-replicating machines. Maybe sentient machines.

But, I thought, why machines at all? If the thing that travels most efficiently between stars is light (and all its avatars: X-rays, radio waves), then why not send
light itself)
Light
modulated
, of course; light alive with information. Light as medium. Sentient light.

Light as domain, perhaps put in place by organic civilizations, but inherited by—something else.

And if human beings are truly latecomers to the galaxy, then the network must already be ancient, a web of modulated signals stitching together the stars. A domain in which things—entities—creatures perhaps as diffuse and large as the galaxy itself, creatures made solely of information—live and compete and maybe even hunt.

An ecology of starlight, or better: a jungle of starlight.

The next day I called Robin’s sf-writer friend and tried out the idea on him. He said, “Well, it’s interesting….”

“But is it possible?”

“Sure it’s possible. Anything’s possible. Possible is my line of work. But you have to keep in mind the difference between a possibility and a likelihood.” He hesitated. “Are you thinking of becoming a writer, or just a career paranoid?”

I laughed. “Neither one.” Though the laughter was a little forced.

“Well, then, since we’re only playing, here’s another notion for you. Living things—species capable of evolving—don’t just live. They eat.”
(Hunt
, I thought.) “They die. And most important of all: they reproduce.”

You’ve probably heard of the hunting wasp. The hunting wasp paralyzes insects (the tarantula is a popular choice) and uses the still-living bodies to incubate and feed its young.

It’s everybody’s favorite Hymenoptera horror story. You can’t help imagining how the tarantula must feel, immobilized but for its frantic heartbeat, the wasp larvae beginning to stir inside it … stir, and feed.

But maybe the tarantula isn’t only paralyzed. Maybe it’s entranced. Maybe wasp venom is a kind of insect ambrosia—
soma
,
amrta, kykeon.
Maybe the tarantula sees God, feels God turning in hungry spirals deep inside it.

I think that would be worse—don’t you?

Was I in love with Robin Slattery? I think this narrative doesn’t make that absolutely clear—too many second thoughts since—but yes, I was in love with Robin. In love with the way she looked at me (that mix of deference and pity), the way she moved, her strange blend of erudition and ignorance (the only Shakespeare she had read was
The Tempest
, but she had read it five times and attended a performance at Stratford), her skinny legs, her pyrotechnic fashion sense (one day black Goth, next day tartan miniskirt and knee socks).

I paid her the close attention of a lover, and because I did I knew by spring (the Eta Aquarids … early May) that things had changed.

She spent a night at my place, something she had been doing less often lately. We went into the bedroom with the sound of soca tapes pulsing like a heartbeat from the shop downstairs. I had covered one wall with astronomical photographs, stuck to the plaster with pushpins. She looked at the wall and said, “This is why men shouldn’t be allowed to live alone—they do things like this.”

“Is that a proposition?” I was feeling, I guess, reckless.

“No,” she said, looking worried, “I only meant….”

“I know.”

“I mean, it’s not exactly
Good Housekeeping.”

“Right.”

We went to bed troubled. We made love, but tentatively, and later, when she had turned on her side and her breathing was night-quiet, I left the bed and walked naked to the kitchen.

I didn’t need to turn on lights. The moon cast a gray radiance through the rippled glass of the kitchen window. I only wanted to sit a while in the cool of an empty room.

But I guess Robin hadn’t been sleeping after all, because she came to the kitchen wrapped in my bath robe, standing in the silver light like a quizzical, barefoot monk.

“Keeping the night watch,” I said.

She leaned against a wall. “It’s lonely, isn’t it?”

I just looked at her. Wished I could see her eyes.

“Lonely,” she said, “out there on the African plains.”

I wondered if her intuition was right, if there was a gene, a defective sequence of DNA, that marked me and set me apart from everyone else. The image of the watchman-hominid was a powerful one. I pictured that theoretical ancestor of mine. Our hominid ancestors were small, vulnerable, as much animal as human. The tribe sleeps. The watchman doesn’t. I imagine him awake in the long exile of the night, rump against a rock in a sea of wild grasses, shivering when the wind blows, watching the horizon for danger. The horizon and the sky.

What does he see?

The stars in their silent migrations. The annual meteor showers. A comet, perhaps, falling sunward from the far reefs of the solar system.

What does he feel?

Yes: lonely.

And often afraid.

In the morning, Robin said, “As a relationship, I don’t think we’re working. There’s this
distance
… I mean, it’s lonely for me, too …”

But she didn’t really want to talk about and it and I didn’t really want to press her. The dynamic was clear enough.

She was kinder than Carolyn had been, and for that I was grateful.

I won’t chronicle the history of our breakup. You know how this goes. Phone calls less often, fewer visits; then times when the messages I left on her machine went unreturned, and a penultimate moment of drawing-room comedy when Roger picked up her phone and kindly summoned her from the shower for me. (I pictured her in a towel, hair dripping while she made her vague apologies—and Roger watching.)