A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “We’ve done our homework, Pete.” She had the program in her hands again. “You took part in a grad student’s telepathy experiment back when you were in college. Do you remember that? You did exceptionally well, by the way; that’s how you made our shortlist. So we know you can do it.”

  The party of clappers by the window was now turning an order of bread pudding into someone’s birthday cake. Peter and the people from Calliope paused for a few dutiful seconds while some of the staff scurried through a version of “Happy Birthday.”

  “Look. The bottom line is I already have a job, and I’m locked in for another six months.”

  “We’re willing to buy out your contract,” Eli said. “If that’s what’s holding you back. Pay you five times what you’re making now.” He looked at Ms. Franklin as if he were waiting for her to contradict him.

  “Yeah? Five times. For how long?” It sounded like some of the fairy tales his agent liked to spring on him, usually in the middle of the night (the concept of time zones was beyond her). Bedtime stories.

  “As long as you like. You can stop, quit, whatever—anytime you want, no questions asked—go back to the show if you’re so inclined, finish out the tour,” Thornquist said.

  “You could fix it so I could get back in the show, just like that?”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s already been arranged,” Ms. Franklin said.

  “And I’m supposed to believe all this.”

  “Give Earl a call when you get home,” Thornquist said.

  Earl Phillips, the company manager. It had to be—there were no other Earls in his life.

  A car was waiting for them when they got outside—not as fancy as the one Ed and Sandra had driven off in but cut from the same formal cloth. It was cooler now and a wind played games with the trees in Rice Park. He was going to let them drive him to his apartment. As the car pulled away he opened the window a crack and took a breath of relatively clean Minnesota air, then thought about the tornado siren going off and nobody doing anything about it.

  Peter was playing the messages on his machine while he emptied the fridge—dumping milk down the drain, cramming perishables into a plastic bag for the garbage shoot: “Calliope’s faxing me the fine print in the morning. It’s Celia, by the way; it’s about tenish. Give us a call when you can. Cheers . . .”

  His agent—everyone thinking it was a movie, for some reason. Earl and now Celia.

  Earl had told him all about the arrangements they had made—“they” being Thornquist’s superiors at Calliope Associates—the buyout, the guarantees, the compensation fee to smooth out the transition period if he was going to be gone for an extended length of time. Earl saying, “Your ship’s come in, buddy.”

  Something about it made Peter want to keep the true nature of it all to himself. He realized then how ashamed he was of his so-called special gifts. And he couldn’t help thinking it wouldn’t last, that he’d be back onstage doing his passable knockoff of “Danny Kaye meets John Cleese” in no time at all—that his trip to “some place warm” (Calliope headquarters, wherever that was) would be nothing more than a well-paid vacation. What did he know about remote viewing, psychometry, clairvoyance—and what had Ms. Franklin called all those voices that used to run through his head when he was a kid? “Clairaudience.”

  But it would be more than just a vacation, he knew that. More than just a job if it actually worked out. He was starting something that reminded him of the day in grade school when he stood up in front of the class and told a story—one of his own, a shtick about an astronaut seeing a UFO outside his space capsule, something like that—and realized he could get them all to follow every word he was saying. He could see it in their eyes; he had them trapped in the web of what he was spinning out. And right then he knew that one day he would be onstage making people laugh and probably getting paid for it.

  He had been sure of it the way he knew about restaurants sometimes, just from passing them on the street—how the chef was feeling that day; the pedigree of the crab salad; the E. coli count on the washroom door handle.

  “Where’s all the money coming from to fund something like this?” Peter said. “People like me don’t come cheap, by the sounds of it.” They were in an airport shuttle this time—all three of them again—rolling down 35E through the bushy fringes of St. Paul. They skirted the Mississippi for a minute or so before heading west along 494 through the suburban sprawl of Minneapolis—airport hotels and car dealerships and big brown official-looking signs sucking traffic into the Mall of America. Eli turned around from the seat in front, his face less severe than last time; he looked younger in the daylight. “Well. Like any other new enterprise we rely on venture capital. We’re listed on the stock exchange. We have people working on that end of things in New York. If you want to see the prospectus, I can get you a copy of it—”

  “No, no. It’s okay. I was just curious.”

  “Believe me, in a couple of years there’ll be all kinds of copycats chasing our tail. They’ll have a new category on the nightly business report: ‘Psi stocks,’ or something like that.” Eli’s bottom lip came out; he was haggling with himself. “—or ‘Psi Technologies’—listed right after ‘Pharmaceuticals.’” He smiled, and looked over at Ms. Franklin, yearning for her approval. Thornquist’s legs were crossed and his pant leg had ridden up, giving Peter a view of hairless white flesh, Wonder bread white.

  The airport was busy, even for a Sunday, or typical for a Sunday. Peter didn’t really know—it just seemed busy. Ms. Franklin walked ahead of him to the American Airlines counter. She had his almost-expired passport in her hand; a porter followed along with the bags: his duffel bag and her expensive-looking matched set. Eli was nowhere to be seen. Ms. Franklin was wearing a neat little business suit today—dark green with a white blouse, a pearl brooch at her throat. She handed him the ticket: an open return through Miami, first class. He was heading for the Caribbean: St. Martin. Definitely warmer than St. Paul.

  Ed had taken a woman to St. Martin—or was it St. Kitts?—on a last-minute three-day package tour; he’d tagged a “personal day” on to his weekend. He’d met her in the Mall of America. In a store that sold only shoelaces, all kinds of shoelaces. Personalized shoelaces. It boasted the longest shoelace in the world. Pete remembered this because when Ed got back, he had given Peter a blow-by-blow, so to speak, of his lost weekend, of what he had done with this pair of shoelaces he’d bought in the store the first time he’d met her—the ones with “Tie me up!” woven into them—over and over again, from aglet to aglet. That’s what the little plastic things on the ends of a shoelace were called—“aglets.” This too Ed had brought back with him from St. Martin.

  St. Paul to St. Martin. Peter wondered if there was some kind of pattern building already. The Lives of the Saints. He was being either blessed or cursed, or maybe to be a true saint you had to be both.

  Later, when they were in the air and the flight attendant was coming by with the pretzels and the trolley of drinks, it came to him that he would probably never do another performance of Howard again. He was never going back—to St. Paul, or New York. A show like Howard, or any other show for that matter. He would never get the so-called big break, never win a Tony or get a three-movie deal in Hollywood (“Emerald City,” some of the kids in the show called it). And he realized he didn’t really care one way or the other anymore—no more Yellow Brick Road. Tornadoes, yes. Lots of wind and water, rain—a few munchkins. He kept seeing a tornado for some reason—a big swirling funnel cloud like the one at the beginning of the movie—a cheap special effect made out of metal hoops covered with fabric. He’d always thought it looked like a spinning circus tent with no roof doing a hula dance, an undulating tube stretching all the way up into the black sky over Dorothy’s farm.

  2

  Sometimes a squiggle is just a squiggle . . .

  Peter woke up to the scent of the place first, the hint of chlorine and mildew, coconut suntan lotion. The air conditioner
blotting out anything like real sound. A high stucco ceiling, exposed rafters, a fan, terra-cotta floor tile, white wicker furniture, lurid floral fabric on the cushions—the whole place tricked out with a time-share show-suite kind of flamboyance.

  He rolled out of bed and pulled back the curtains, his eyes slowly turning the dazzle into blue-green, full-cream beach, then blue again, the sea turquoise-brown where it cut into the rocky shoreline, palms right there outside the window. He shut off the air conditioner and opened the French doors. Thornquist was right; it was warmer than St. Paul—a balcony, a breeze, a real one, genuine tropical air blowing across his chest; hibiscus, lizards darting like floaters across his field of vision. There were real sounds now: the rustle of the growing things working with the breeze. No smoke. Ed’s cigarette was on the other side of the world.

  “We want you to relax for a few days, get your bearings, the feel of the place,” Thornquist was saying—this was later over breakfast. “If you want to do some sight-seeing, we can let you have one of the cars for a day or two.” He was wearing a suit at ten o’clock in the morning, twenty yards from the beach. The waiter brought him orange juice and a coffee and he sat there taking alternating sips of each as Peter finished his omelet.

  “There’ll be more of you trickling in over the next few weeks—but don’t feel compelled to introduce yourself. It’s not a Shriners convention.” His straw fedora was in his lap; his hair looked thinner in sunlight.

  “‘More’?”

  “The others, new recruits like yourself.” He smiled. “Not quite like you, all different really.” Thornquist turned in his chair and gazed off toward the pool—a kid about sixteen was moving beach chairs around, swiping at them, brushing them off with the towel he kept draped over his shoulder, lining them up in the morning sun. “All alike, but all different.” He pulled his gaze back and smiled, tipping his head to one side—Peter thought of the actor Anthony Hopkins for a second—a false smile, something salesmen are trained to do. “Like I said: get your bearings first, relax.” He looked out toward the beach. “Enjoy the amenities.” He slid his chair back noisily, draining his orange juice glass at the same time. His hat was on his head now. His bottom lip came out to tell the world he was thinking. He stood up and said, “If you need anything—” then nodded the rest of it.

  His hand was in his pocket; Peter thought he was pulling out money—a tip for the waiter, maybe; but he came up with a small metal box. It was a dull, filing-cabinet gray, about the size of two packs of cigarettes side by side. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Abbott, when you get a minute, today or tomorrow, a quiet time in your room—see if you can tell me what’s inside. No pressure. We’ll talk about it in a day or so.” The smile again. “Over coffee.” He placed it gently next to Peter’s egg-smeared plate. There was a notarized seal along one side, and a little sticker on the lid, like a price tag—with the number “16” written on it.

  Peter spent the next few days waiting for something to happen, for these other “recruits” to show up so he could start earning his keep. He strolled along the beach and explored the small town about a twenty-minute walk down the road. It had a Shell station selling “Robbie’s” lottery tickets and Coke. He found a place on the waterfront that served jerk chicken, rice and peas, Jamaican beer. As he walked back toward Calliope a flock of kids in uniforms came out of their school, running past him, gangling and graceful all at once.

  The ruins of an old mill on the craggy hill overlooking the bay was something he decided to leave till later. Peter steered clear of it as he always did with old abandoned places. He sensed, however, that it had something to do with why they had hired him; that they wanted him up there listening, smelling out the dank past of the place. He still hadn’t touched the metal box Thornquist had given him. It was where he’d left it that morning: in his room on the shelf above the hookless coat hangers.

  “You’re a very gifted man, Mr. Abbott.” Ms. Franklin—her first name was Jane, Peter had discovered; she called him “Mr.” so he kept calling her “Ms.”—was interviewing him in a part of the place he’d never seen before. The terrace beyond the French doors faced away from the ocean; it looked out on a scrubby hillside scarred with power lines; a microwave relay tower poked through the green crown of the hill beyond it.

  “When you were in college you volunteered for an ESP experiment, do you remember? Guessing Zener cards? Your psych prof suggested you do it.” A plain cream cotton T-shirt today—and blue jeans, in spite of the heat. Legs crossed, leaning back in her chair, a white sandal barely holding on to the one foot he could see. She held the pen between her fingers like a cigarette. Long fingernails as red as her dress had been that night in St. Paul.

  “Yeah, you mentioned that in St. Paul,” Peter said, thinking back—school days, school days. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Not so long ago. You did well on that test. Extremely well.” She was using her notes now, tapping her pen at the page, making it spill the beans. “So well, they brought you back in for a few more sessions. Do you remember that? Your score was off the chart. The second and third run of tests, you were back on track, statistically safe.” Her voice a swerving alto, slow—creamy, like her T-shirt.

  “All I remember was doing the test again, getting it right this time, I mean, not rocking the boat. I was happy about it because it meant more money. I think it was fifteen bucks a session, something like that.” He remembered sitting there in this stuffy booth with this microphone in front of him that smelled of cigarettes. They had him wear a headset that beeped every time he was supposed to guess what card a grad student in the next room was dealing to himself—“Zener” cards, she called them—one with a squiggle, another with a box—like that. A circle, a star. Five in all.

  “What would you say if I told you you did even better the second set of trials but in a different way?” He said nothing. “You got almost every card right but out of sync. Your hits were for the card after the one you were aiming for. You were picking up data from the future. Or clairvoyantly reading the cards in the deck before they were picked up by the experimenter.”

  Pete wasn’t surprised at all, really. This kind of stuff had been happening to him all his life; he hadn’t needed some sophomore test to convince him of it. And he didn’t now. What puzzled him was that they felt this gift he had was so important—to him it was a curse. All his life he had tried to hide it, like a bad case of psoriasis.

  “Do you remember taking a quiz back then? Around the same time you were doing the ESP trials—a multiple-choice questionnaire?”

  He shook his head.

  “No? Well someone in the psych department gave you what’s called a Myers-Briggs—it’s a personality assessment test. You scored a high ENFP, which means you’re an ‘Extroverted’ slash ‘Intuitive’ slash ‘Feeling’ slash ‘Perceptive’ kind of guy. The correlation between a high ENFP and psychic ability is a statistical fact. It’s no wonder you did so well with the telepathy experiment.” She put down her pen and leaned back in her chair; it gave back a faint, door-hinge squeak. “What we’d like to do is test you again if you don’t mind.”

  “What? This Myers-Briggs thing? Or the Zener cards?”

  She shook her head. “Something a bit more challenging. A ‘stretch.’ Isn’t that what they call it in your business?” She smiled in that way confident women do, more with the eyes than the mouth. Then again, it could have been something she’d picked up in a salesmanship course—like parroting body language.

  “Have you dealt with Eli’s target yet? The little box he gave you?”

  “No, I keep putting it off.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. ’Cause it’s there, the reverse Mount Everest thing—procrastination.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you mean?” Peter knew exactly what she meant; she wanted him to spell it out—put it into words, confront it, dredge it up just like they say in all those off-the-rack self-help therapies—lure him
into something like an AA meeting where he was supposed to get up and testify: My name is Peter and I’m an actor, but more than that, I’m a repressed psychic, clairvoyant, sensitive, whatever jargon you want to dress it up in, pretending to be an actor. The acting is a way of using it, exploiting it without admitting it—without dealing with it.

  “Is that the only reason? Plain old procrastination?”

  “You tell me. It must be in that file somewhere.” She would have to work for it.

  She stopped making notes and got up from the chair as if the meeting were over, crossed the room to the opposite wall, which was a hefty accordion folding partition—he hadn’t noticed it till now—and opened it enough to get them through.

  Beyond it he could see an expensive reclining chair with something like a dentist’s lamp attached to it, and a plain swivel office chair beside it. There were no visible windows, only floor-to-ceiling drapes along the far wall. Like a curtain waiting to go up. The light change threw him off—the room was washed in a soft red glow from the lamp attached to the recliner.

  “Sit down, please, Pete. Make yourself comfortable. It’s not what you think. Don’t worry.” He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know what she thought he was thinking it meant.

  “I’m going to hypnotize you in a way. It’s not really hypnosis, it’s more like sensory deprivation. I’m going to teach you how to relax to the point where you almost fall asleep and stop right there—at the borderline between waking and sleeping—what’s called the hypnagogic state. It’s a variation of the ganzfeld.”

  “Ganzfeld?”

  “It means ‘whole field.’ It’s a way to cut out the junk your senses are bombarded with, allow you to concentrate.”

  She made him lean back and hold still while she taped what looked like half a Ping-Pong ball over each eye—he asked her and she said that was exactly what they were. She moved the lamp closer (he could hear the faint twang of its springs) and a rosy glow filled his field of vision.