The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

men had the head of the penis pierced (a “Prince Albert”) but Roger hadn’t gone for that.
    I was jealous. Jealous, I suppose, of this extra dimension of intimacy from which I was excluded. I had no wounds to show her.
    She said, “You never talk about your divorce.”
    “It’s not much fun to talk about.”
    “You left Carolyn, or she left you?”
    “It’s not that simple. But, ultimately, I guess she left me.”
    “Lots of fighting?”
    “No fighting.”
    “What, then?”I thought about it. “Continental drift.”
    “What was her problem?”
    “I’m not so sure it was her problem.”
    “She must have had a reason, though—or thought she did.”
    “She said I was never there.” Robin waited patiently. I went on, “Even when I was with her, I was never
there
—or so she claimed. I’m not sure I know what she meant. I suppose, that I wasn’t completely engaged. That I was apart. Held back. With her, with her friends, with her family—with anybody.”
    “Do you think that’s true?”
    It was a question I’d asked myself too often.
    Sure, in a sense it was true. I’m one of those people who are often called loners. Crowds don’t have much allure for me. I don’t confide easily and I don’t have many friends.
    That much I would admit to. The idea (which had come to obsess Carolyn during our divorce) that I was congenitally, hopelessly
set apart
, a kind of pariah dog, incapable of real intimacy … that was a whole ‘nother thing.
    We talked it around. Robin was solemn in the dark, propped on one elbow. Through the window, past the halo of her hair, I could see the setting moon. Far away down the dark street someone laughed.
    Robin, who had studied a little anthropology, liked to see things in evolutionary terms. “You have a night watch personality,” she decided, closing her eyes.
    “Night watch?”
    “Mm-hm. Primates … you know … protohominids … it’s where all our personality styles come from. We’re social animals, basically, but the group is more versatile if you have maybe a couple of hyperthymic types for cheerleaders, some dysthymics to sit home and mumble, and the one guy—let’s say,
you
—who edges away from the crowd, who sits up when everybody else is asleep, who basically keeps the watches of the night. The one who sees the lions coming. Good night vision and lousy social skills. Every tribe should have one.”
    “Is that what I am?”
    “It’s reassuring, actually.” She patted my ass and said, “Keep watch for me, okay?”
    I kept the watch a few minutes more.

    In the morning, on the way to lunch, we visited one of those East Indian/West Indian shops, the kind with the impossibly gaudy portraits of Shiva and Ganesh in chrome-flash plastic frames, a cooler full of ginger beer and coconut pop, shelves of sandalwood incense and patchouli oil and bottles of magic potions (Robin pointed them out): St. John Conqueror Root, Ghost Away, Luck Finder, with labels claiming the contents were an Excellent Floor Polish, which I suppose made them legal to sell. Robin was delighted: “Flotsam from the gnososphere,” she laughed, and it was easy to imagine one of Roger’s gnostic creatures made manifest in this shop—for that matter, in this city, this English-speaking, Cantonese-speaking, Urdu-speaking, Farsi-speaking city—a slouching, ethereal beast of which one cell might be Ganesh the Elephant-headed Boy and another Madonna, the Cone-breasted Woman.
    A city, for obvious reasons, is a lousy place to do astronomy. I worked the ’scope from the back deck of my apartment, shielded from streetlights, and Robin gave me a selection of broadband lens filters to cut the urban scatter. But I was interested in deep-sky observing and I knew I wasn’t getting everything I’d paid for.
    In October I arranged to truck the ’scope up north for a weekend. Robin reserved us a cabin at a private campground near Algonquin Park. It was way past tourist season, but Robin knew the