These Latest Perseids

David Mohan

Edie Powell realized what was happening on the morning they announced the sighting of the meteors.

Lately, she had grown tired of thinking about God – instead, for just a while, she considered the lifespan of comets. With a little knowledge of such things you gained a new sense of how everything eventually gets left behind by orbits that might as well be forever. These latest Perseids, spotted over the European Southern Observatory VLT, would be active all through the summer. Until August in fact. And comets were such gloriously inconstant things – the Swift-Tuttle wouldn’t be back again for over a hundred years, and yet these Perseids fell and fell, waiting for something to stop them.

When the news program finished, Edie turned over, exhaled, opened her eyes.

The house was quiet and she could hear her exhalation: a low whistle with an undertow of huskiness in her chest. She saw what little breath she produced as steam in the bedroom – Charl liked the bedroom cold, something austere from his childhood that she indulged, despite everything.

This breath was, like all the others lately, an experiment. Dead woman breathing. She could feel it, she could feel it, something, something rasping at the back of each breath. First the heart attack, minor apparently, followed up with two stents and an altered smorgasbord of drugs, but still the fluid she sometimes felt she was drowning in persisted. Fluid on the lungs, a little after-effect they said, a tremor following a quake. They followed up with test after test, drug after drug, and now her heart was fine: it would take just a little time more. But she knew it was no use. She’d made the connection no one else could, no one else who didn’t live in this skin, that is. She wasn’t ever-so-slowly recovering. This was a decline and when you know it, you know it bodily, in your gut, your heart, your breath.

Edie sat up in bed then, swung herself around and hoisted herself, propped against walls and doorjambs, as far as the bathroom. Last night had been the second homecoming from the hospital, and she found the stairs a burden on her own. Best to leave them for now. But being home was a pleasure and a fear. Undeniably so. She wanted to be in the home she had made herself, but part of her knew she wasn’t ready to be here, or to be precise, wasn’t fit to be here, not like this. In any case, what a feeling to sleep in your own bed again, and yet to also feel a stranger. The house seemed alien to her – it was so unkempt it had become the property of other people’s neglect - her sons, Charl, her grand-daughter.

Could she really call it hers still – this salon-style gallery of wardrobes, the robes hung on the back of her long mirror, her dressing table with its jade box and faux-oriental fan? In these circumstances, it seemed as pointless to pick up these things as it did to lay them aside. For the moment, all she could think of was her breath: how when she inhaled she seemed to throw that in-breath into the far reaches of her chest like a penny in a well, but that it had become harder and harder to fish that breath out again as an absolute exhalation. The penny slipped from her net each time, fell further with each falter, refusing to return.

The worst thing of all, however, was the night. She had never been a good sleeper but now she lay on heaped-up cushions trying to will an out-breath towards a lowering ceiling. It was a terrible thing to feel breathless lying on your back, apropos nothing. When Charl was snoring beside her she would listen to the lush huskiness of his breath enviously. In the past it had driven her wild with frustration, but now she took a scientific interest. She would count it in and out, measuring, waiting for it to catch on some internal mechanism, then marvel when it returned, broken, grizzled, but intact.

Sometimes Holt would grind his chair against the floor next door. Her damnable son worked at his home desk late sometimes, but it was a comfort to hear him tramp about next door or wander downstairs for food or liquor. You felt less stranded in your wakefulness when someone else followed you into the migraine-glare of the early hours.

Edie looked up this moment, and Holt was there sitting at the edge of the bed, as though summoned by her thoughts. These days, she didn’t hear people before they appeared these: they just arrived like visitations.

She reached across the white duvet cover. “Hey there, honey,” she said. “Have I been out of the room and back again? I barely remember.”

It’s only when she spoke that she realised how dry her lips were, how torn open no matter how much balm she pressed into them. She had lost weight, at first she thought it a blessing, but now she felt raw and exposed, her skin stretched taut as though by an invisible drawstring.

Holt took her hand in an intimate way, toying with it absently as though it were an object he had long-possessed. Distracted, he rubbed the backs of her hands, the drip puncture wound that never healed, the scaly places no lotion assuaged.

“You sound too hoarse to bear,” he said, leaning over. “Try a sup of something.”

She sipped a little water, although the taste was bitter as salt.

“Aren’t you going out today?” he asked. “Aren’t you going somewhere at all?”

“I don’t think so.” She smiled. Holt was the only one who still did this: talk to her like she had that choice.

“Downstairs, even?”

“Possibly,” she said. “With a little help perhaps.”

“What about cards? Fancy a little poker?”

Edie shook her head, then shifted her head slightly. She saw herself lying across the other side of the room, reflected in her wardrobe mirror. Now, she saw her morning face. She looked shipwrecked on the bed, her hair stuck to her face with sweat, her skin white and blotchy, the grey in her roots showing.

This was the further fallout of three months ago, the heart attack they said was minor, recoverable from, a glitch in their treatment with zero damage. Could there be such a thing? she wondered. Fallout and fallout later, she was not so sure.

Holt let go of her hand, his gaze drifting towards the window. “Will I send Cherry Pie up? She could cosy up beside you, warm your feet.”

“It’s OK, honey,” she said. “I’m just tired, that’s all. Just leave me sleep a while.”

She knew Cherry was downstairs somewhere, playing with cars on the window ledge or watching TV. But she wouldn’t have her hauled up here now, not while she like this. You started off thinking you can protect your grandchildren from life, and then you find yourself obliged to protect them from the knowledge of yourself.

And besides: this falling and falling inside her was a split particle of her realization – she was no longer that girl’s grandmother in the same way as before. She had turned into something else.

“Happily,” Holt said, “if you’ll oblige. But turn off that radio, will you? It’s this horrible static all through the room – no wonder you don’t sleep.”

“Leave it,” Edie said, as his weight shifted off the bed. “I want to listen to the news when it comes on.”

Then, in an eye-blink, Holt dematerialized as swiftly as he had appeared. It wasn’t even a goodbye to see him like that at all, with no chance to ask after his luck with the horses, or scold them if he’d been drinking too early. Now that he was gone, the light seemed changed after his departure and she wondered if she’d been asleep after all. That was it, surely. Or perhaps she’d experienced some throw back from a solar flare, a momentary lapse of space and time. The voices on the radio would know if she had the strength to call in.

For a moment the image hung in the dark of her mind, a photograph lying in its bath of acid. When it faded again, she wondered about his absence, gathering in what she remembered of the day before, and the day before that.

One thing was true in these days of falling: she liked the radio every hour she lay awake. There was a comfort to voices after all, and it made her feel connected, plugged into the world of muscular voices, so to speak. Most of the time it was on impossibly low, a dull murmur underlying the quiet, but sometimes she turned it up to hear things that caught her interest. Like the shipping forecast or strange news about the Perseids or the invention of Japanese earthquake airbags or the theory that flatworms might hold the key to immortality. She liked news of impossible-sounding things – any such ideas and events that gave her infinitesimal room perspective and space.

With the radio tuned in and stuttering she could feel she was floating in inhabited waters, and that there was possible land nearby and warm harbors to rest in.

And not a repeat visit to the hospital and that room with those sad women who had long given up on their looks and let their hair grow wild and white, half of them on respirators, with tubes in their noses and arms. She wasn’t of that tribe yet, she hoped. Better to die now in an instant if she was.

She slid down and round, deep into the warm cave she’d built by lying in her bed so long. Then she swung around and let her legs falter with a swimming motion like a horse in a river. After a moment, her toes touched the carpet, ever so delicate. It was just two meters to her window. This was her version of travel now – the radio for commentary and the window for a view. Together they helped her construct an elsewhere.

She held herself at the edge of the bed for a moment, hesitant to launch off but also reluctant to call one of the boys. She preferred to do these small things herself, despite the breathlessness. Tottering a little, askew in her gait she made it to the window ledge and held on, clawing the pocked grain to see a rain-blurry green place that reached as high as a screen of spruce, their tops swaying slightly in the exterior bluster. This view only went so far but it was an improvement on the bland curlicues of her bedroom’s cornicing.

And see, there, evidence in the slight motion of those tree tops – this exterior world was breathing, was moving on like cloud, was breath itself. She wanted for a moment to open the window and gulp it down until it choked or saved her, whichever came first.

She stood looking for a while, trying to will her breath to follow suit with how the trees moved, as though underwater, billowing out and then curling in. It’s either this or the ward again, and the doctor saying as he did last time, “We won’t let you home until we’ve solved you,’ all as though she were nothing more than some kind of equation in a physicist’s notebook.

Edie wandered unsteadily back to bed - almost fell into it this time. Collapsing was the word for how she fell now onto the whispering surface. She felt so heavy, and when she settled down she felt like a body thrown overboard into the sea - there was that sense of a plummet, and then, ease. It was like that scene from who, from what, some story by Chekhov, some tragedy at sea.

Curling into a comma shape, she let the whole catalogue of the days in the year just gone by roll through her mind. She saw how she had landed in this soft-edged place. In some ways it was hard to imagine but in others it seemed inevitable when she measured each tremor against each warning quake.

As she tried to sleep once more she listened to the radio begin to talk about dwarf galaxies hidden in plain sight of earth, the discovery of Tellurium in distant stars. All of this felt reassuring in the dusk light. She closed her eyes and thought of the shower of things she would leave in her wake – a score of rolled up tissues on her bedside table with traces of her blood and saliva written into their substance, a glass of water with the stigma of her lip-prints on the rim, her mauve slippers at the foot of the bed, a barely-used Kindle, recently bought by her niece, looking now more and more like a relic to obsolescence itself, a crossword book and pen.

Then she cast out further trying to see the spread and reach of her influence. Beyond the ambit of her night lamp there were wardrobes filled with clothes, off the landing there was a closet full of the last towels she ironed, then downstairs, her potted plants, the yucca and the Easter lily, and the orchid she received as a gift from the woman across the street. They would be parched by now, waiting for her glimmer.

Then there was her niece with her cars, her monster trucks, inventing traffic with her mind, a girl who was both meteor and her own comet, following her own dive trajectory. She couldn’t imagine where she would fall.

Then, casting off all pretense at occupying the room she inhabited, Edie imagined all the beautiful pieces of furniture she’d chosen in the past, re-upholstering them in her mind as they tumbled through her mind.

The rosewood three piece vanity with the oval mirror, the tall pine dresser with a roast coffee stain. They floated past her like jetsam in Dorothy’s cyclone. Then, with a lurch and a rasp that might be bolts pulling away from hinges, the house itself seemed to float away as though it were hurtling out of Kansas in the back wind of a Twister, so that her back yard, worked on all that Spring, was suddenly falling, falling, trees un-potted, trailing root systems, a lawn unrolling like green licorice, until finally, her thoughts scattering as they touched the road outside her gate, she felt her actual body throw sparks as it burnt, dissipating, the dark of the land rising to meet her as she fell.