Free The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

“Are we game?”
    Someone had to go first. In this case it was Michelle, my wife. She opened the carved-basswood jewelery box we kept for the occasion and slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside. “I’m in,” she said. “But it’s a toughie, John.”
    In the end we all anted up, even Chuck Byrnie, the tweedy atheist from the U. of T. chemistry department, though he grumbled before committing himself. “Somewhat unfair. More in Deirdre’s line than mine.”
    Most of us were faculty. Deirdre was our chief exception. She had no credentials but an arts degree, class of ’68, and a long perambulation through Toronto’s evolving fringe cultures: Yorkville, Rochdale, Harbord Street, Queen Street. She owned the Golden Bough Gem and Crystal Shoppe, where Michelle worked part-time. She was perhaps the paradigm of the aging hippie, gray-tressed and overweight, usually draped in a batiqued caftan or some other wildly inappropriate ethnic garb. But she wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t afraid to match egos with the rest of us. “Stop whining, Chuck. Even the physicists are mystics nowadays.”
    “You’ve read Mary Baker Eddy. You have an advantage.”
    “Oh? And where would you guys be without Roger Bacon? Admit it—all you science types are closet alchemists.”
    Fifteen hundred dollars in the kitty. Michelle locked the box in our safe, where it waited for a winner. Gatherings were held weekly, but the contest was quarterly. We had three months to play Christ, Buddha, Zoroaster. Winner take all.
    The challenge sparked an evening’s conversation, which was the purpose of it. What was religion, exactly, and where did you start? A new paganism or a new Christian heresy? Did UFOs count? ESP?
    From these seeds would spring our ideas, and after tonight we wouldn’t mention the subject again until the results were presented in November. It was our fifth year. The contest had started with a friendly wager between Michelle and a self-styled performanceartist named Heather, something about whether Whitman was a better poet than Emerson. I had ended up refereeing the debate. Our Friday night social circle rendered final judgment, and we all enjoyed it so much (except Heather, who vanished soon thereafter) that we made it an institution, with rules: a Challenge, a Challenger, a hundred-dollar ante, judgment by tribunal. Challenges had ranged from the whimsical (rewrite your favorite fairy tale in the style of William Faulkner) to the grinding (explain the theory of relativity using words of one syllable, points for clarity and brevity). Our best pots had topped two thousand dollars.
    Carver’s challenge was … interesting, and I wondered what had prompted it. To my knowledge he had never shown much interest in religion or the occult. I remembered him from my course on the Romantics, blithely amused but hardly fascinated. Something Byronesque about him, I thought, but without the doomed intensity; say, Byron on Zoloft. Tonight he was animated and engaging, and I wondered what else I had missed about him.
    Sometime past midnight I stepped out onto the balcony for a breath of air. We had lived in this apartment for ten years, Michelle and I. Central but a little north, seventeen stories up, southern exposure. The city scrolled away from us like a vast and intricate diagram, as indecipherable as the language of the Hittites. Lights dim as stars cut into the black vastness of Lake Ontario, all quivering in the rising remains of the heat of the day. Here was a religion, I thought. Here was my religion. My secret book, my Talmud.
    I had known this about myself for a long time, my addiction to the obscure beauty of the city. For most of my life I had consoled myself in its contradictions, its austerities and its baroque recomplications. Here was the short answer to Carver’s challenge. I would make a city religion. An urban occultism. Divination by cartography. Call it paracartography.
    Carver came through the sliding door as if I had