The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson

Author:Robert Charles Wilson [Wilson, Robert Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-87374-5
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2008-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

I work four days a week at a downtown used-book shop, shelving and stocking and making sales for the obese owner, who lives upstairs with his collection of brocaded smoking jackets and his Oscar Wilde first editions. His last employee had gone mad or fled to the wilds of British Columbia, depending on which version of the story he chose to tell. Either scenario had begun to seem plausible.

Holding a job means keeping regular hours, unfortunately. Mikey learned when to look for me in the building’s tiny lobby. Usually I could forestall his hints and invitations with a wave or a complaint about how busy I was, perhaps the world’s most pathetic lie. But Mikey had the doggedness of a true obsessive-compulsive.

I came home Thursday too tired to fend him off and accepted the offer of coffee at his apartment. “Good!” he exclaimed. “Hey, fine! Roll out the red carpet!”

Mikey may or may not have been capable of sarcasm—I’ve never been sure.

He turned the key in his lock—he had locked his apartment even for a stroll down the corridor—with all the pomp and circumstance of a bank president cracking a vault. A peculiar odor wafted out as he opened the door, the acrid smell of ancient laundry and unaired rooms, but under that a cloying sweetness, as if he had spilled a jar of honey once long ago. I drew a precautionary breath and stepped inside.

The obsessive-compulsive is doomed to display his mania. Mikey, at least, was an orderly O-C. The floor was naked parquet, the sofa and chair shabby but positioned symmetrically: I was certain the distance to each adjacent wall would match within a millimeter. There were no visible books except for a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in relentless order on a shelf.

And bugs. Insects, rather. Mikey was an amateur entomologist, or at least a bug collector. The specimens framed and mounted on the walls were nothing exotic, only what you might find on the streets any average summer: June bugs, ladybugs, cicadas; even cockroaches, centipedes, silverfish. Creatures more often scraped off the sole of the shoe than admired under glass.

But I admired them, or at least pretended to. Mikey, for once, was unresponsive, wouldn’t talk about his collection, just measured coffee by the level teaspoonful into an immaculately washed percolator and whistled nervously to himself. When we sat down on his clean but ragged, ancient sofa all he wanted to talk about was Dr. Koate and the Group.

Mikey admired Dr. K. “She’s a genius. Good with meds. Best meds of any doctor. You’re still just doing lithium, right?”

“That’s all I need, Mikey.”

“Don’t be so sure.” He tapped his shining forehead. “Things hide. It’s a complicated system. Serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine: every brain cell like a gun with a thousand bullets, a thousand fingers on a thousand triggers. Brain cells talk in chemistry, did you know that?” His coffee cup rattled on his trembling knee. “Like insects. Pheromones. Hormones. Chemicals. The same way insects talk. Like in

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