The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

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 inthe 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-treatmentplant. 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.