The Perseids and Other Stories (15 page)

Suddenly I wanted to cry. “I don’t understand!”

Hubble touched his lips again. He was solemn. “One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.”

Carter stood beside the table glancing between the old astronomer and myself. “They’re calling your flight,” he said. “Did I miss something?”

Edwin Hubble died that autumn, still making plans for the Hale Observatory, still probing the limits and implications of the red shift. He suffered a fatal heart attack at the end of September—the twenty-seventh, if I recall correctly. He had been on the mountain for the first time in many weeks, making long photographic exposures of NGC 520, and he was looking forward to another run. I cried when I heard the news.

My uncle continued his career in astronomy, eventually left Palomar for a tenured position at Cal Tech. He died, too, prematurely, halfway through Reagan’s second term.

George Adamski, who owned the diner up the mountain, went on to publish several accounts of gaudy flying-saucer jaunts around the solar system. Crank books, clearly, though I sometimes wonder what prompted his change of career.

Aldous Huxley, whom I had met briefly at my uncle’s party, experimented with mescaline and wrote
The Doors of Perception
, his own inquiry into what he called “the antipodes of the mind.” His book dwells at length on light, the quality of light, the intensity of light. He died of throat cancer on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

And I went back to Toronto, finished school, left home, married a petroleum chemist, raised two children, and nursed my beloved husband through his own long struggle with cancer.

I live alone now, in a world 1953 might not recognize as its linear descendant. The multiethnic, information-intensive, post-industrial present day. The Great Metrollopis of the World. The world is full of frightening things.

But I am not afraid to look at what I see.

Lately they have come back.

They have come back, or, Hubble might say, I have gone back to them.

There is no explanation. They are the perennially anticlimactic, the ever-unknown. The world expands, or I am shrinking, and sometimes my less than 20/20 vision turns inside out, and in the long nights I see them moving through the walls. I have even visited the palace of light, and the palace of light is as terrible and enigmatic as ever.

And they are as sad as ever, their eyes more poignant than I remembered, but—is it possible?—they seem, in their alien fashion, somehow pleased with me.

Pleased, I think, because I’mnot afraid of them anymore.

I look, in order to understand. The understanding is elusive, but I suppose it will come, perhaps at the moment I reach the final dwindling point, the event-horizon of my own life, when the universe expands to infinity … and will they be there?

Waiting?

I don’t know. I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

The question, now as always: Do I belong here?

F-wing invites doubt. You’re never quite alone in F-wing, but it’s not a place anyone actually belongs. There are no waiting rooms in F-wing, just these barely upholstered chairs scattered along the hallway. Not much in the way of magazines, either. I’d learned to buy my own at the hospital gift shop.
Time, Newsweek:
barricades of choice for the antisocial outpatient. But when I saw Mikey Winston barrelling toward me with all the blind momentum of a runaway tractor-trailor, I knew with that no mere magazine would daunt him.

I didn’t know his name at that point. He was only vaguely familiar, a face I’d seen somewhere, not here. Mikey waddled along the corridor in a striped T-shirt that didn’t quite meet the waist of his thrift-shop trousers, trouser cuffs turned up over tattered low-top Nikes. Fixed grin, pig-narrow eyes, a high forehead merging into black hair that ran in strings to his dandruff-dusted shoulders. Gray teeth, not a complete set. He found the chair next to me.

“Meds?” he asked.

I put down
Time.
“Pardon me?”

His voice had the penetrating power of a veterinary syringe. “You’re here for Dr. Koate, right? Tuesday group, right? New guy?”

All those things, Heaven help me.

“So,” he said, “what meds are you on?”

I wasn’t prepared for this frontal assault. I made the mistake of answering him. “Lithium,” I admitted.

“Just lithium?”

Yeah, just. Babe in the woods, me.

“So you’re, uh, bipolar?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s nothing much. That’s no big deal. I’ve done Librium, Elavil, Prozac, Paxil…a couple of anxiolytics for a while…Tofranil for years, but I hated it. Made me sweat. Now I’m on the new one.”

“The new one?”

“Thallin. You gotta know about that. New one. Hey, I recognize you,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yeah. What’s your name?”

“Zale,” I said. “Bob Zale.”

“Zeal. Laze.”

“What?”

“Anagrams. Zale. Mix up the letters, you know, like the Jumble cartoon in the newspaper. You’re on the mailbox!”

“Mailbox?”

“In the lobby. We live in the same building. That’s where I saw you.”

Come to think of it, that was where I’d seen Mikey: a gnome on the stairway, forging his way through drifts of cigarette butts to the lobby mailbox. I live in a four-story brick apartment building on a busy street near Sunnybrook Hospital, the sort of building that houses single mothers, immigrants working night shifts, recluses, marginal cases of all sorts. My new fraternity.

Mikey introduced himself. “I’m at the other end of the basement! B-13! We’re neighbors!”

I was less than overjoyed.

Dr. Koate thought group would be good for me, so I was invited to her biweekly 10 A.M. with a half dozen of the walking wounded. I won’t dwell on this. Suffice to say that I was introduced to Estelle, of the Thorazine twitch and raw-chewed fingers;
Mikey, obsessive-compulsive and subject to schizophrenic interludes; Daniel, who had been arrested while masturbating during the New Year’s Eve celebration at Nathan Philips Square, which must have been a chilly exercise; Kip, a reformed heroin addict and incompletely reformed paranoid, age eighteen; and two other women so pathologically withdrawn that I never did learn their names.

Dr. Elizabeth Koate sat in the midst of this zoo, her smile as unflagging as her blouse was neatly pressed. No lab coats in F-wing. We’re all just folks here. Actually, I admired Dr. Koate’s unshakable calm, her lucid and benevolent presence. I often wondered what it cost her, in emotional terms. Did she go home at night and bite the cat?

She introduced me to the group, or rather encouraged me to introduce myself. I ran down the salient facts. Thirty years old, newly single, ex-electrical-engineer (ex-several-things by now), suffering a bipolar “mood disorder,” as I’ve been encouraged to think of it, probably since adolescence but only lately diagnosed.

Estelle, the finger-chewer, asked what had finally brought me to therapy.

Every human instinct resists these confessions. Anyway, it was a tricky question. Where do you start? The money wasted senselessly, the suicidal impulses, the drinking binges, the failed marriage?

“My daughter,” I said finally.

Dr. Koate gave me a meaningful and gently interested look. “Your daughter told you to go into therapy?”

“No. I went into therapy when I figured out that my daughter was afraid of me.”

No further questions.

Dr. Koate asked Mikey how he was responding to his meds. He glowed at the attention. Six months on Thallin, our Mikey, and liking it. “It’s not heavy. It doesn’t load down the body. Less pushy than Prozac, and I’m not sleepy all the time.”

And so around the circle. Prozac, Limbitrol, Elavil, Triavil; Thallin, Thallin, Thallin. I felt like a novice, a parvenu, with my simple chemical salt, though the list of potential side-effects appended
to the small brown bottle of Lithotabs has a nicely ominous ring: dry mouth, blurred vision, loss of coordination; in a worst-case scenario, blackouts, blurred speech, seizures, coma.

We psychonauts expect these hazards. They are the tigers in our jungle, the anacondas of our private Amazon.

Naturally, Mikey didn’t drive. Naturally, he begged a ride with me. Rain came down in torrents, glazing the Sunnybrook parking lot and making even a polite refusal impossible.

Mikey nestled into the passenger seat, exuding his own odd chem-lab smell. Nervous at first, he entertained me by rearranging the letters on the traffic signs.
(“Pots! Texi!”)
Then, a gambit on my part, we talked about the apartment building. I thought of it as an affordable rat hole. Mikey claimed to like living there.

“Basement at the back,” he said, “not bad, close to the laundry room, storage, not bad. Close to the furnace. Warm in winter. Not bad at all.”

“The bugs don’t bother you?”

“Bugs?”

“The ants.”

“Oh, ants. Well, you know,
ants
—I don’t mind ’em.”

The building was a unique property. The problem wasn’t cockroaches, though I had found one or two prospecting the bathroom walls, but ants. They boiled up from under the basement floorboards, ignored all propriety, invaded shoes, clothing, sleeping bodies. I had reached a kind of armed truce by way of liberal applications of Crack ’n Crevice Raid, which was probably contaminating my food and causing my testicles to shrink. I told Mikey Pd complained to the superintendent. Mikey was unexpectedly upset.

“Mr. Saffka, Mr. Saffka, he won’t do anything. Maybe put down more roach powder in the halls. Make life difficult. Did you
have
to complain?”

“Yeah, I think I did.”

“Make life more difficult. I’ll talk to them.”

“Who, the ants?”

But Mikey didn’t answer.

My ex-wife, Corinna, had been granted custody of my daughter, Emily in the divorce settlement. I hadn’t contested the issue. I trusted Corinna, I didn’t trust myself, and in any event I knew what the courts would make of a male parent with bad debts and a psychiatric condition.

I told Mikey good-bye and retreated to my own apartment—a “bachelor” apartment, or more accurately a closet with a toilet. There was e-mail from Em. Bless the Internet for letting me exchange these semaphores with my daughter, ions darting between two synapses in the World Brain. Em, twelve years old, had mastered the electronic mysteries. Her note was chatty and peppered with happy-face emoticons.

Her class had gone on a field trip to the Humber River Valley—one of those glorious late-May rock-turning expeditions, I gathered. Many and various were the small things that lived in the pitch-black riverside muck: water striders, mayflies, eggs and larvae and protozoa. Em was excited because she’d found a rock with the image of a trilobyte frozen in it. “It is even older than you, Dad!:-)”

The river of time, I told her in a return note, is the oldest river of all, rich with life. Em was my contribution to that river, my own ripple in the stream: I the sinking stone, Em the perfect golden wave shimmering in the sunlight.

(Dr. Koate calls this kind of thinking “fatalistic” and wants me to avoid it.)

We arranged to meet on the weekend, brunch at McDonald’s and maybe a movie in the afternoon. Saturday was my regular day with Em. Lately she had stopped cringing at the sight of me, and for that thank Lithium, thank Dr. Koate, thank even Biweekly Group.

Which left only the evening to kill. Bless television, while we’re counting our blessings. Television talks to you when there’s no human voice but your own, when your own voice is an abusive whine that hums in your head like a dynamo. God bless lithium and Raid and cable TV, and God bless me, if I should wake before I die.