The Perseids and Other Stories (11 page)

It isn’t a pretty history, Deirdre said. Look at it dispassionately. Much as we might want to believe in benign or enlightened spirits, what do these creatures do? Kidnap people, rape women, mutilate cattle, substitute changelings for human infants, cast lives into disarray. They mislead and they torture.

If these creatures are not wholly imaginary, Deirdre said, then we should regard them as dangerous. Also sadistic, petty, lascivious, and very powerful. However seductive they might sometimes seem, they’re clearly hostile and ought to be resisted in any way possible.

Carver said, “That seems a little glib. What do you suppose these creatures want from us? What’s in it for them, Deirdre?”

“I can’t imagine. Maybe they’re Michelle’s ’temporal deities’—half-gods, with the kind of mentality that delights in picking wings off flies. There’s a sexual component in most of these stories. Sex and cruelty.”

“They sound more human than divine.”

“I think we’re a playground for them. They inhabit a much larger world. We’re an anthill, as far as they’re concerned.”

“But why the hatred?”

“Even an ant can bite.”

“Time’s up,” Chuck Byrnie said.

“Thank you, Deirdre,” John Carver said. “Very insightful. Let’s tally the votes.”

There’s a city inside the city—the city at the center of the map.

I couldn’t see the hole in the map because for me there was no hole: the gap closed when I looked at it, or else the most important part of the map was invisible to anyone but myself.

And that made sense. What I had failed to understand was that paracartography must necessarily be a private matter. My map isn’t your map. The ideal paracartographical map charts not a territory but a mind, or at least it merges the two: the inner inner city.

Michelle took the prize. She seemed less pleased with the money than with John Carver’s obvious approval.

Deirdre took me aside as the evening ended. “Jeremy.”

“Mm?”

“Are you blind or just stupid?”

“Do I get another choice?”

“I’m serious.” She sighed. “There’s something in you, Jeremy, something a little lost and obsessive, and he found that—he dug it out of you like digging a stone out of the ground. He used it, and he’s still using it. It amuses him to watch us screw around with these scary ideas like little kids playing with blasting caps.”

“Deirdre, I don’t need a lecture.”

“What you need is a wake-up call. Ah, hell, Jeremy…. This is not the kind of news I love to deliver, but it’s obvious she’s sleeping with him. Please think about it.”

I stared at her. Then I said, “Time to leave, Deirdre.”

“It matters to me what happens to you guys.”

“Just go.”

Michelle went wordlessly to bed.

I couldn’t sleep.

I sat on the balcony under a duvet, watching the city. At half-past three, the peak (or valley) of the night, I thought I saw the city itself in all its luminous grids begin subtly to shift, to move
without moving, to part and make a passage where none had been.

I closed my aching eyes and went inside. The map was waiting for me.

My department head suggested a sabbatical. She also suggested I consult a mental health specialist.

I took the time off, gratefully. It was convenient to be able to sleep during the day.

There is a city inside the city, but the road there is tortuous and strange.

I glimpsed that city for the first time in December, late on a cold night.

I was tired. I’d come a long way. The lost city was not, at first sight, distinctly different. It possessed, if anything, a haunting familiarity, and only gradually did I wake to its strangeness and charm.

I found myself on an empty street of two- or three-story brick buildings. The buildings looked at least sixty or seventy years old, though the capstones had no dates. The brick was gray and ancient, the upper-story windows shuttered and dark. Remnants of Depression era advertising clung to the walls like scabs.

The storefronts weren’t barred. Cracks laced the window glass. The goods dimly visible behind the panes were generic, neglected, carelessly heaped together: pyramids of patent leather shoes or racks of paperback books in various languages. The businesses were marginal, tobacco shops or junk shops or shops that sold back-issue magazines or canned food without labels. Their tattered awnings rattled in the wind.

It sounds dreary, but it wasn’t, at least not in my eyes; it was a small magic, this inexplicable neighborhood glazed with December moonlight, chill and perfect as a black pearl. It should not have existed. Didn’t exist. I couldn’t place it in any customary part of the city nor could I discern any obvious landmarks (the CN Tower, the bank buildings). Streets parted and met again like the meanders of a slow river, and the horizon was perpetually hidden.

The only light brighter than the winter moon came from an all-hours coffee shop at a corner bereft of street signs. The air inside was moist but still cold. Two men in dowdy overcoats sat huddled over a faded Formica tabletop. Behind the cash counter, a middle-aged woman in a hairnet looked at me blankly.

“Coffee,” I said, and she poured a cup, and I took it. It didn’t occur to me to pay, and she didn’t ask.

Things work differently at the heart of the heart of the city.

And yet it was familiar. It ached with memory. I’d been here before, sometime outside the reasonable discourse of history.

I took my notebook from my jacket pocket. Maybe this was where I had invented my ideoglyphs, or where the invisible city had generated them, somehow, itself. I flipped open the notepad and was only mildly surprised to find the words suddenly, crisply legible. This did not astonish me—I was past that—but I read the contents with close attention.

Every page was a love letter. Concise, nostalgic, sad, sincere, my own. And every page was addressed to Michelle.

Finding my way home was difficult. The hidden city encloses itself. There are no parallel lines in the hidden city. Streets cross themselves at false intersections. There are, I think, many identical streets, the peeling Edwardian town houses and bare maples layered like fossil shale. I don’t know how long it took to find my way back, nor could I say just where the border lay or when I passed it, but by dawn I found myself on a pedestrian bridge where the railway tracks run south from Dundas, among the warehouses and empty coal-dust factories of the city as it should be.

I checked my pocket, but the notebook was gone.

Most of the universe is invisible—invisible in the sense of unseen, unexperienced. The deserts of Mars, the barrens of Mercury, the surfaces of a million unnamed planets, places where time passes, where a rock might tumble from a cliffside or a glacier calve into a lifeless sea, invisibly. Did you walk to work today, or take a walk after dinner? Everyday things are rendered or remain invisible: the mailbox you passed (where is it exactly?), the crack in
the sidewalk, the sign in the window, this morning’s breakfast.

I think I didn’t see Michelle. I think I hadn’t seen her for a long time.

Have I described her? I want to. I can’t. What memory loses is invisible; it evaporates into the desert of the unseen universe.

I’m writing this for her. For you.

Michelle wasn’t home when I looked for her. That might have been normal or it might not. I had lost track of the days of the week. I went to look for her at Deirdre’s store.

Winter now, skies like blue lead, a brisk and painful wind. The wind ran in fitful rivers down Bay Street and lifted scrap newspapers high above gold-mirrored windows.

The store was closed, but I saw Deirdre moving in the dim space inside. She unlocked the door when I tapped.

“You look—” she said.

“Like shit. I know. You don’t look too good yourself, Deirdre.”

She looked, in fact, frightened and sleepless.

“I think he’s after me, Jeremy.”

“Who, Carver?”

“Of course Carver.”

She pulled me inside and closed the door. Wind rattled the glass. The herbal reek of the store was overpowering.

Deirdre unfolded a director’s chair for me, and we sat in the prism light of her window crystals. “I followed him,” she said.

“You did what?”

“Does that surprise you? Of course I followed him. I thought it was about time we knew something about John Carver, since he seems to know more than enough about us. Did he ever tell you where he lives?”

“He must have.”

“You remember what he said?”

“No….”

“No one remembers. Or else it didn’t occur to them to ask. Don’t you find that a little odd?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Turns out he lives in the Beaches, out near the water-treatment
plant. Here, I’ll write down the address.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“The fuck it’s not necessary. Information about John Carver has this interesting way of disappearing.”

“I came here to ask you about Michelle.”

“I know.”

She scrawled the address on the back of a register receipt. “And Jeremy, one more thing.”

“What?”

“Be careful of him. He’s not human.”

Don’t be ridiculous, I began to say, but the words stuck. In the realm of what was possible and what was not, I had lost all compass. “Do you really believe that?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time reading the strange books, Jeremy, and talking to the strange people. It’s hard to believe in hidden information in the information age, but there are still some mysteries that haven’t made the Internet. Trust me on this.”

“What should I do?”

She looked away, ashamed of her impotence. “I don’t know.”

Long story short: I went home; Michelle hadn’t shown up, nor did she come home that night.

I didn’t sleep. I watched TV, and when that was finished I watched the minute hand sweep the face of Michelle’s bedroom clock. Michelle didn’t believe in digital clocks—hated them. The only digital clock in the apartment was the one on my wrist. She believed time ran in circles.

I fell asleep at dawn and woke to find daylight already fading, snow on the windowsill, snow falling in sheets and ribbons over the city. No Michelle.

I tried phoning Deirdre. There was no answer at the store or at her home number.

Then I remembered the address she had scrawled for me—John Carver’s address.

I was in my jacket and headed for the door when the phone rang.

“Jeremy?”

Deirdre, and she sounded breathless. “Where are you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Jeremy, don’t try to get hold of me after this.”

“Why not?”

“They busted my garden! Raided the store, too—on principle, I guess.”

“The police?”

“It wasn’t the fucking Girl Guides!”

“You’re in custody?”

“Hell no. I was having lunch with Chuck Byrnie when it happened. Kathy managed to warn me off.” She paused. “I guess I’m a wanted criminal. I don’t know what they do to you for growing grass anymore. Jail or a fine or what. But they trashed my house, Jeremy, and my place of business, and I can’t afford legal fees.” She sounded near tears.

“You can stay here,” I said.

“No, I can’t. The thing is, only half a dozen people knew about the garden. Somebody must have tipped the police.”

“I swear I never—”

“Not
you
, asshole!”

“Carver?”

“I never told him about the plants. Somebody else must have.”

The wind scoured grains of snow against the balcony door, a sandpaper sound.

“You’re saying Michelle—”

“I’m not pissed at Michelle. It comes down to John Carver, and that’s why I called. He means business, and he isn’t pleased with me. Or you.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“I can’t be sure of anything. I think he’s been manipulating us from the word go.”

“Deirdre—”

“My advice? Throw that fucking map away. And good luck, Jeremy.”

“How can I reach you?”

“You can’t. But thanks.”

Time passes differently in the secret city.

Day follows night, sunlight sweeps the sundial streets, seasons pass, but the past eats itself and the future is the present, only less so. We pace the sidewalks, we few citizens of this underpopulated city, empty of appetite, wordless, but how many others are keeping secret diaries? Or keeping the same diary endlessly rewritten, stories worn smooth with the telling.

I took a last look at the map. The map was mounted on a press-board frame leaning against the wall of my study.

The map was sleek, seductive, and inexpressibly beautiful, but I didn’t need it anymore. It had never been more than a tool. I didn’t need the map because I contained it—I
was
the map, in some sense; and it would be dangerous, I thought, to leave so potent a self-portrait where strangers might find it.

So I destroyed it. I carved it into pieces, like a penitent debtor destroying a credit card, and then I pushed the pieces down the garbage chute.

Then I went to look for Michelle.

What Michelle hadn’t said, what Michelle hadn’t guessed and Deirdre hadn’t figured out, was that a temporal deity, even a minor and malevolent one, must own
all
the maps, all the ordinary and the hidden maps, all the blueprints and bibles and Baedekers of all the places there are or might be or have ever been.