The Perseids and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

man would enter, and Jacob would smile and ask him to stay for a game, and play cleverly, and feint against the doomed queen, and lift a lost pawn from the board as if it were nothing more than a piece of carven wood.

THE PERSEIDS
    The divorce was finalized in the spring; I was alone that summer.
    I took an apartment over a roti shop on Bathurst Street in Toronto. My landlords were a pair of ebullient Jamaican immigrants, husband and wife, who charged a reasonable rent and periodically offered to sell me grams of resinous, potent ganja. The shop closed at nine, but most summer nights the couple joined friends on a patio off the alley behind the store, and the sound of music and patois, cadences smooth as river pebbles, would drift up through my kitchen window. The apartment was a living room facing the street, a bedroom and kitchen at the rear; wooden floors and plaster ceilings with rusting metal caps where the gas fixtures had been removed. There was not much natural light, and the smell of goat curry from the kitchen downstairs was sometimes overwhelming. But taken all in all, it suited my means and needs.
    I worked days at a secondhand book shop called Finders, sorting and shelving stock, operating the antiquated cash register, and brewing cups of yerba maté for the owner, an ancient myopic aesthete who subsisted on whatever dribble of profit he squeezed from the business. I was his only employee. It was not the work I had ever imagined myself doing, but such is the fortune of a blithe thirty-something who stumbles into the recession with a B.A. and negligible computer skills. I had inherited a little money from my parents, dead five years ago in a collision with a lumber truck on Vancouver Island; I hoarded the principal and supplemented my income with the interest.
    I was alone and nearly friendless and my free time seemed to stretch to the horizon, as daunting and inviting as a desert highway. One day in the bookshop I opened a copy of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
to the passage where de Quincey talks about his isolation from his fellow students at Manchester Grammar School: “for, whilst liking the society of some amongst them, I also had a deadly liking (perhaps a morbid liking) for solitude.” Me, too, Thomas, I thought. Is it that the Devil finds work for idle hands, or that idle hands seek out the Devil’s work? But I don’t think the Devil had anything to do with it. (Other invisible entities, perhaps.) Alone, de Quincy discovered opium. I discovered Robin Slattery, and the stars.
    We met prosaically enough: she sold me a telescope.
    Amateur astronomy had been my teenage passion. When I lived with my parents on their country property north of Port Moody I had fallen in love with the night sky. City people don’t understand. The city sky is as gray and blank as slate, faintly luminous, like a smoldering trash fire. The few celestial bodies that glisten through the pollution are about as inspiring as beached fish. But travel far enough from the city and you can still see the sky the way our ancestors saw it, as a chasm beyond the end of the world in which the stars move as implacably and unapproachably as the souls of the ancient dead.
    I found Robin working the show floor at a retail shop called Scopes & Lenses in the suburban flatlands north of the city. If you’re like me, you often have a powerful reaction to people even before you speak to them: like or dislike, trust or fear. Robin was in the
like
column as soon as she spotted me and smiled. Her smile seemed genuine, though there was no earthly reason it should be: we were strangers, after all; I was a customer; we had these roles to play. She wore her hair short. Long, retro paisley skirt and two earrings in each ear. Sort of an art-school look. Her face was narrow, elfin, Mediterranean-dark. I guessed she was about twenty-five.
    Of course the only thing to talk about was telescopes. I wanted to buy one, a good one, something substantial, not