The Perseids and Other Stories (22 page)

“Who’s Lizzie Borden?” Faye asked.

“Axe murderess,” Conrad said. “Before your time.”

“Hey,” I said. “Ghost stories. Shouldn’t we roast a marshmallow or something?”

“Donald is reinforcing his little wall of rationality. I think he wants us to help.”

Maybe. I had played that game too, the mirror game, when I was young, and William was right. Try as you might not to see it, the monster would always show up, raise your hackles, scare you into the light. I dislike mirrors. I dream about them from
time to time. The notion for
Plato’s Mirror
had come straight from a nightmare, and that was a factoid I had neglected to share with Helen or Faye.

“But it’s a perfect opportunity!” Faye said fervently. “Look, Donald, the whole
city
is dark.”

And so it was. The blackout had quenched every light for blocks around. There were only occasional headlights down along Bathurst Street, and not many of those. In the apartment tower across the alley, one or two flashlights flickered behind the windows. Otherwise, dark. But so what?

“The mirror!” Faye said. “We can see the whole city—I mean the
essence
of the city.”

“If we hurry,” Conrad added. “They usually fix these things pretty quick.”

“Gimme the candle,” Faye said. “I’ll fetch the mirror.”

I said, “You can’t be serious.”

“Yes!” A chorus. “We can!”

I burned my indignation in a joint and watched them go about their little game. Faye took the mirror out onto the minuscule balcony that adjoins the kitchen and balanced it on the Adirondack chair. Their voices were nervous and enthusiastic: children’s voices. Faye had found the Christmas candles and they each carried one, like monks with gaudy votive candles, red green white, initiates into the Mystery. But no Dionysian underground, only this fifth-story pigeon perch.

The hush of the four A.M. city was shocking. Live in a city long enough, you forget about quiet. Stepping out onto the balcony (reluctantly, with a candle of my own) I heard all the sounds normally lost under the pressure of daylight: dripping eaves and drawn breath and even a train whistle, some CN freight crossing the Don. Tag ends of lightning flickered far away.

“Now blow out the candles,” Faye said solemnly.

Out they went.

“Yours too, Donald.”

“I like the light. Helps keep me from falling down.”

“Don’t be a pig! You’ll ruin it.”

So I blew out the candle.

But I didn’t look at the mirror. In the dark, would Faye see this small act of cowardice?

I should have covered my ears, too. There was, at first, nothing to hear, only the steady drip of rainwater and a breath of wind. Then, finally, their voices, hushed with awe:
So beautiful
and
It can’t be
and
oh God!

So I looked, despite my best intentions.

At first the mirror seemed merely opaque, the same fogged-silver Victorian grotesque that might have been salvaged from any condemned Toronto boardinghouse or crumbling semidetached—junk, in other words. But then the glass misted and roiled like fog on a lake, and images surfaced, faintly at first, then suddenly crisp. From where I stood the mirror reflected the city skyline, towers immersed in cloud made bright and intricate as cowry shells in clear water, and every brick a prism.

“It’s,” William stuttered,
“heartbreaking.…
”

And it was. In the absence of light every object glowed with its own essence, radiated purer colors than any rainbow. How can a color you’ve never seen be so achingly familiar?

“And the people,” Faye whispered.

People?

“Look hard,” she urged me. “Let it in.”

Yes. Behind stone walls, brick walls, and forests of rusted re-bar: people. People sleeping, mainly. People like small galaxies, constellations suspended in the night. “So beautiful,” Faye sighed again. No two alike, yet all the same, as if souls had fallen from the clouds and drifted through open windows, the banked win-drift of humanity.

Conrad and William had found each other’s reflections. I saw them, too. They were in love, and love has its own spectrum, its own unearthly color. Something bright and gauzy (ectoplasm? passion?) floated between them, delicate as lace. Their bodies had been unclothed by the mirror. They had become bright vortices of energy, knots of life on a rope of spine. Bones like pastel coral.

Now Faye stepped into view. I felt the heat of her attention on my skin. She said, “Oh, Donald!” Words rippled the air. Her eyes
were at once fierce and gentle, lenses focusing the light of distant suns. “Look at yourself!”

I meant to. I swear I did. But something else caught my attention.

“Faye?” I said.

“… yes…?”

“Some of those people out there—they’re not—”

I felt her frown. “Not what? I don’t know what you mean.”

Not
Essences.
Oh, I saw the Essences, jewel-bright in their beds and sleeping the sleep of children. But also—
look harder
—the others. The ugly, intelligent ones. Call them Archons. They float (
look harder, Faye, look as hard as you can)
between the buildings, patroling the night in clockwork formation, skeletal, big-headed, hairy and malevolent as spiders.…

I backed up a step.

You look at them, they look at you. Their attention is caustic and demanding.

“Donald, what is it?”

“Can’t you see them?”

Maybe she couldn’t. Bless her green eyes: maybe only the good light got through. She started to say, “Look at
yourself
, Donald, and then—” But I lashed out, kicked the slats of the Adirondack chair, which collapsed spectacularly, the mirror shattering against the concrete floor of the balcony, each fragment flashing briefly bright as lightning before it chimed into darkness.

Conrad and William went home—shocked, dazed, breathless. They had shared a memory they might never discuss—it really did beggar language—but it would always be there between them, for better or worse, a mystery that would echo whenever they touched.

Faye stayed behind—for a while.

She didn’t say much. I did the talking.

I won’t repeat the obscenities here. I cursed her at length for
finding the mirror and for bringing it into my home and for mind-fucking my friends with it. When she began to cry I didn’t let that stop me; I called her brainless, gullible, illiterate, an eager slut.

I was aware of hurting her. The urge to hurt her, to humiliate her, ultimately to drive her away, was palpable, a weight in my throat, a buzz behind my eyes. I watched her sink to her knees, sobbing, and felt gratified.

She said she would leave. I said, “About fucking time.”

But before she left she went to the balcony and gathered what she could of the broken mirror, harvesting glass by candlelight. Came back with sharp silvered fragments and splintered wood and bloodied fingers. Taking back her gift, I thought, but then she did the unexpected.

She held up the largest fragment of the mirror, and blew out the candle, and said into the expanding darkness, “If only you could
see
, Donald!”

She wanted me to see that I was an angel—an Essence—as bright and full of color as the rest of them. To see my goodness, I suppose.

And I did see that. (I’m not blind.)

But I saw the
other
, too. I saw what Faye could not: the Archon, the one who had been with me all along, spindly arms close to mine, black-mandibled skull bobbing in back of my own. I’m not alone. I know this too well, Faye: I think I’ve always known it, glimpsed this image in too many dream-mirrors. The Archon is every day a little closer, close as a shadow now, close as a lover, and it will have me soon enough; and if it has me then it will have Faye or whoever replaces Faye. And the voice shouting obscenities, the shrill voice accusing her of ignorance and stupidity, the voice trying so fervently to drive her away, now, now before it’s too late—

It’s the voice of the angel.

She left, at last, in tears, for good.

I waited for sunrise. But the room was dark.

Angels wept. And I was not alone.

In the year after Lorraine’s death I contemplated suicide six times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat bottle of clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my own weakness.

I can’t say I wish I had succeeded, because in all likelihood I did succeed, on each and every occasion. Six deaths. No, not just six. An infinite number.

Times six.

There are greater and lesser infinities.

But I didn’t know that then.

I was only sixty years old.

I had lived all my life in the city of Toronto. I worked thirty-five years as a senior accountant for a Great Lakes cargo brokerage called Steamships Forwarding, Ltd., and took an early retirement in 1997, not long before Lorraine was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that killed her the following year. Back then she worked part-time in a Harbord Street used-book shop called Finders, a short walk from the university district, in a part of the city we both loved.

I still loved it, even without Lorraine, though the gloss had dimmed considerably. I lived there still, in a utility apartment
over an antique store, and I often walked the neighborhood—down Spadina into the candy-bright intricacies of Chinatown, or west to Kensington, foreign as a Bengali marketplace, where the smell of spices and ground coffee mingled with the stink of sun-ripened fish.

Usually I avoided Harbord Street. My grief was raw enough without the provocation of the bookstore and its awkward memories. Today, however, the sky was a radiant blue, and the smell of spring blossoms and cut grass made the city seem threatless. I walked east from Kensington with a mesh bag filled with onions and Havarti cheese, and soon enough found myself on Harbord Street, which had moved another notch upscale since the old days, more restaurants now, fewer macrobiotic shops, the palm readers and bead shops banished for good and all.

But Finders was still there. It was a tar-shingled Victorian house converted for retail, its hanging sign faded to illegibility. A three-legged cat slumbered on the cracked concrete stoop.

I went in impulsively, but also because the owner, an old man by the name of Oscar Ziegler, had sent an elaborate bouquet to Lorraine’s funeral the previous year, and I felt I owed him some acknowledgment. According to Lorraine he lived upstairs and never left the building.

The bookstore hadn’t changed on the inside, either, since the last time I had seen it. I didn’t know it well (the store was Lorraine’s turf and as a rule I had left her to it), but there was no obvious evidence that more than a year had passed since my last visit. It was the kind of shop with so much musty stock and so few customers that it could have survived only under the most generous circumstances—no doubt Ziegler owned the building and had found a way to finesse his property taxes. The store was not a labor of love, I suspected, so much as an excuse for Ziegler to indulge his pack-rat tendencies.

It was a full nest of books. The walls were pineboard shelves, floor to ceiling. Free-standing shelves divided the small interior into box canyons and dimly lit hedgerows. The stock was old and, not that I’m any judge, largely trivial, forgotten jazz-age novels and belles-lettres, literary flotsam.

I stepped past cardboard boxes from which more books overflowed, to the rear of the store, where a cash desk had been wedged against the wall. This was where, for much of the last five years of her life, Lorraine had spent her weekday afternoons. I wondered whether book dust was carcinogenic. Maybe she had been poisoned by the turgid air, by the floating fragments of ivoried Frank Yerby novels, vagrant molecules of
Peyton Place
and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

Someone else sat behind the desk now, a different woman, younger than Lorraine, though not what anyone would call young. A baby-boomer in denim overalls and a pair of eyeglasses that might have better suited the Hubble space telescope. Shoulder-length hair, gone gray, and an ingratiating smile, though there was something faintly haunted about the woman.

“Hi,” she said amiably. “Anything I can help you find?”

“Is Oscar Ziegler around?”

Her eyes widened. “Uh, Mr. Ziegler? He’s upstairs, but he doesn’t usually like to be disturbed. Is he expecting you?”

She seemed astonished at the possibility that Ziegler would be expecting anyone, or that anyone would want to see Ziegler. Maybe it was a bad idea. “No,” I said, “I just dropped by on the chance… you know, my wife used to work here.” 1 see.

“Please don’t bother him. I’ll just browse for a while.”

“Are you a book collector, or—?”

“Hardly. These days I read the newspaper. The only books I’ve kept are old paperbacks. Not the sort of thing Mr. Ziegler would stock.”

“You’d be surprised. Mysteries? Chandler, Hammett, John Dickson Carr? Because we have some firsts over by the stairs.…”

“I used to read some mysteries. Mostly, though, it was science fiction I liked.”

“Really? You look more like a mystery reader.”

“There’s a look?”

She laughed. “Tell you what. Science fiction? We got a box of paperbacks in last week. Right over there, under the ladder.

Check it out, and I’ll tell Mr. Ziegler you’re here. Uh—” “My name is Keller. Bill Keller. My wife was Lorraine.” She held out her hand. “I’m Deirdre. Just have a look; I’ll be back in a jiff.”

I wanted to stop her but didn’t know how. She went through a bead curtain and up a dim flight of stairs while I pulled a leathery cardboard box onto a chair seat and prepared for some dutiful time-killing. Certainly I didn’t expect to find anything I wanted, though I would probably have to buy something as the price of a courtesy call, especially if Ziegler was coaxed out of his lair to greet me. But what I had told Deirdre was true; though I had been an eager reader in my youth, I hadn’t bought more than an occasional softcover since 1970. Fiction is a young man’s pastime. I had ceased to be curious about other people’s lives, much less other worlds.