A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “Were these isolated incidents or—would you say they were typical?” Thornquist asked, straightening up and reaching into his jacket; he took out a small notebook.

  “The television started acting up—that was the next thing, I guess. At first we thought it was the cable company. A program would come on, or Beth would change the channel—put on something Simon didn’t like—and the picture would go all funny. Sometimes it would go back to the show he wanted. The cable people couldn’t figure it out. It would never happen when they were around.

  “And then he got into diving, which I think made him more content with himself, less angry with the world. His father was a good swimmer and we had a pool at the house by then, and later on this one at the club. He picked it up really fast; he was fearless, he’d try anything. We got him involved in a program. His coach said he had a good ‘kinetic memory.’ He started competing, winning every now and then. When he did those somersaults it was like he made time stand still.” She paused and looked out to the pool; Thornquist took a sip of coffee and crossed his legs. “He could have gone to the Olympics if it wasn’t for the accident,” she continued. “The Junior Olympics, about twelve, thirteen years ago. The ten-meter platform: that was his thing—the tower. He hit his head coming out of a back two-and-a-half. Ended up with a horrible cut and a slight concussion. That’s all, thank God. We were scared he’d done himself some permanent damage, and I guess it did, really—after that he couldn’t dive anymore. For a while he wouldn’t even go near a pool.”

  “Do you know where he is now, Mrs. Hayward? Is there a number we could reach him at?”

  Eli Thornquist regretted having the piece of pie. It had turned into a fiery lump just under his rib cage—where he always imagined his heart was. He wanted this meeting over with—the last recruit on their dream list: Simon Hayward, the best of the bunch, the most potential, supposedly—if they could track him down. He’d always imagined the food would be up to standard at a place like this—an established downtown racquet club that had been around for almost a hundred years, the pretentious plaque on the lobby wall had said. This woman across from him was pleasant enough, as pleasant as any mother could be in a conversation about a son whose life could not be distilled into a synopsis worthy of her expectations. Thornquist got the feeling she would trade her son in if she could, for one of the young men he could see now, on the tennis court beyond the pool. Glossy nonentities, whose lives would follow the indisputably satisfactory trajectory of a well-returned serve—the kind of man who mistakes nostalgia for poetry.

  This woman in her tennis whites looked ten years younger than she must be—fit, slim. The sun had done its damage, though; the skin around the eyes, the backs of her hands—like the rings of a tree. She reached down to the purse beside her chair and took out a small, well-used address book. The page she turned to was a spider’s nest of scrawls and amendments. She took the dainty pen Thornquist had slipped from the leather spine of his own notepad and wrote down the number on the fresh page he presented her with. She looked up quickly and gave him the kind of smile he expected from someone in physical pain. “I hope this works out for him; he needs a job. A real job. Something.”

  Simon Hayward closed the umbrella and let the rain pummel his face. Wet. Wetter than he’d ever been. This city like an eternal clammy car wash. Underwater wet was something else—the opposite somehow; unwettable. A spot on the top of his head was suddenly stenciled with cold rain: an arc of sensation amid the dense bristles of his crew cut. Follicle-free scar tissue.

  He crossed the street through the eternal traffic. Like the endless rain, an essential part of Vancouver in his mind now; traffic fighting for any of the space left between the mountains and the ocean—this city going down in his mind as a place for cars, full of hopelessly disturbed drivers who never looked up at the Brownian lilt of the city’s craggy horizon.

  “I will never own a car,” he said out loud as he threaded his way umbrella-first through the gridlocked traffic at the intersection—Robson Street on a Saturday night. “I will walk my feet off first.” Simon parried an Acura trying to break through a gap in the trickle of pedestrians crossing the road. He thrust at the headlight of a BMW. In the cone of floodlit rain his half-furled umbrella looked like flapping bat wings—black, glistening. “Fuck you,” he said under his breath. Water trickled down his face; he could feel the dampness crawl through his clothes—his Bill Blass overcoat hung like something dead and bleeding on his shoulders.

  Someone is dialing my number, he thought to himself. Mom. His mother doing her weekly duty. His dutiful return call would ensure that the check was in the mail. “Yes, the same address. No, this place is working out fine . . . No, Janis is still here with the dog; her friend Jeff is off somewhere planting trees. Yes, Mom, they do need more trees up here in British Columbia. Yes, it is kind of ironic, you’re right. Bye, Mom. Talk to you next week.”

  He worked his way through the umbrellas and clusters of pedestrians—his feet were officially wet now, his new Rockport shoes, “World Tours” or whatever they were called, leaking at the seams—till he found it, the “Caftan,” a coffee shop that wasn’t a Starbucks. A place that had tanning machines in the back, for some reason—caffeine and a fix of UV somehow connected—at least that’s what the people who ran the place were betting on.

  Betty stopped eating to talk again; she had to force the mouthful down with an exaggerated swallow. “Jeremy was going on and on about meridians or whatever they’re called. Your body having special places on it that control other places? Like rubbing your hand to get rid of a headache? Stuff like that.” She picked up the sandwich—a salad wrapped in a high-fiber flat bread—and peered at the inner workings of it. “I don’t know—your head hurts because your head hurts. Rubbing something doesn’t affect something else.” Her tongue roamed her mouth in search of vagrant scraps of sandwich as she mulled over the implications of what she had just said. Her hand came up to cover her detonating laugh. “Jesus, did I say that? I’m so stupid—” Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling and her cheeks pinked for a moment.

  “It’s like that woman who sued her obstetrician?” She was frowning now, silently snapping her fingers as she dug up this new memory. “’Cause he said her baby was going to be a girl, from the ultrasound? So she and her husband go and buy all this furniture and stuff? For the baby’s room? All this pink baby furniture, and they spend all this money on pink wallpaper and fancy pink curtains, whatever—making it into this, you know, this—Barbie doll girl’s room? Guess what? Turns out it’s a boy, so they sue the doctor for damages or whatever, ’cause the little guy’s penis didn’t show up on the fucking ultrasound.” She laughed through the last bit, bouncing her torso to underline it. Simon watched her breasts echo the trajectory of her shoulders, then follow through with a slower, more pronounced arc of heavy breast movement.

  Inertial dampers, Simon thought. Breasts made women more graceful; their body-fat percentage made them better swimmers than men. This girl who could float better than he could: her breast the weight of an egg, maybe two eggs, he’d noticed the other night, cupping one of them after she’d taken her top off—she had turned on the desk lamp in her room, angled it against the wall to get the best effect, then pulled her sweater over her head, presenting him with her breasts like someone selling jewelry. The weight of an egg, no, two or three Grade-A-Large eggs, eggs being his unit of measure all of a sudden—the nipple small and gritty under his tongue, the surprise of a seed in a seedless grape. Betty had a ripeness about her, the fleshy newness of eighteen-year-old skin—olive perfection, the plump fold at her waist like the edge of a bolt of silk. Her hair was like a curtain, a straight-cut black proscenium framing her face. Her stark, aubergine lipstick always pulling her mouth to center stage . . . Simon couldn’t see what she was getting at—the meridians, the ultrasound; the connection she was trying to make eluded him. Rubbing something. The penis—maybe that was it.

  “Your head hurts because the
re’s something wrong with your head. That’s what I think.” Betty licked the ends of two fingers one at a time, picked up her napkin, and dabbed at her eggplant lips. A paper napkin with a coffee cup wearing sunglasses printed on it. “Jeremy said we could come over later if we want to; they’re all going to a reading or something, at the Culch, something about panoramic cameras? Whatever.” Her face wrinkled trying to remember what would be a powerful enough reason for them to go all the way over to the East Vancouver Cultural Center on a night like this: “It’s a lecture about this famous photographer—they’re going to have slides and everything.”

  She reached over and touched Simon’s hand, playing circles round his knuckles with her long fingernails, looking over the new crop of people moving through the restaurant, taking a slow deep breath after her sandwich as if she’d just done something strenuous, her tongue idly searching between her teeth. A couple walked by their table and Simon could feel the cold damp air falling from their coats. He moved his hand away from hers and picked up his empty coffee cup, wondering whether she would think he was sending her a signal—then whether or not he wanted to send her a signal. He agonized over signals, all kinds of them. He constantly doubted his own ability to read them. He was a door checker, a stove checker. He had once spent ten minutes in an underground parking lot testing the door handles of a car he’d borrowed from a friend. Thinking about what he was doing—the behavior. Not the content of it, but the process; so he would have to go back over it all again, forcing himself to concentrate this time. Obsessive-compulsive, they called it.

  Simon could pick up on things no one else could—like knowing someone had just dialed his number. An image or a scrap of information would fall into his consciousness like a brick thrown through a window; strange voices would crash through that blurred borderland between waking and sleeping. Every now and then he would be visited with a clarity of thought that he knew without a doubt had come from the mind of someone else. But what he took in with his five normal senses, he always questioned.

  Obsessive-compulsive. Like now. His hand was at his own throat, checking the small, gold St. Christopher medal he wore round his neck. Confirming its existence. He never took it off. His mother had given it to him when he was about sixteen years old. On the last day of the Junior Olympics. “This is to protect you on your life’s journey,” she had whispered in his ear, the implication being that the medal was just a taste of what was to come—the Big One. The Summer Games in Seoul, Korea, 1988.

  He’d worn it for his final dive from the ten-meter platform and it must have affected his timing in some way because he came out of his first somersault too close to the tower. He hit his head and knocked himself out. When he came to his mother was standing over him. He remembered smiling up at her and saying (or he remembered his mother telling him what he’d said), “I won’t do that again, will I, Mom?” She started crying and fussing with the medal, trying to undo the chain. He’d reached up and pushed her hand away.

  Sometimes when he was anxious about something he would find himself reaching for it (St. Christopher, protecting him on his journey). Not for comfort but as a sign that all was intact, the physical part of him at least; that the history of his body was connected to the present.

  He was thinking now, about how Betty could have picked up on his headaches; he couldn’t remember telling her about them. It was the kind of personal stuff he wouldn’t tell anyone. Certainly not Betty. He compartmentalized his life. He always had—he did it without thinking about it. One group of friends knowing only so much, another set with a different picture of him—a different sketch. It would be recognizable to the others, but skewed somehow, viewed from a different angle.

  The dull ache in his head he had learned to live with, but the whistling was something new. It had started two days before when he was watching TV, during a bit on the news about a man who had almost been killed by a frozen chunk of green stuff crashing through the roof of his house. It was from a passenger plane, a DC-10, they said. The green liquid they use for the toilets had bounced around in the stratosphere and turned into a giant, green hailstone. He was eating dinner, alone—a Lean Cuisine Teriyaki Stirfry. This food that had been a frozen lump in his grimy microwave, now in front of him, in a steaming plastic tray. Transubstantiation. Eating alone. His wife needed this week by herself to think it all through, she said; him thinking being single again like the old days, before they got together, would be paradise—the ring out of his nose for a change—and here he was on a Friday night eating a fucking . . . Simon stopped it cold—it wasn’t a memory anymore; this was not part of the news story—the unending flow of connections and details were coming from somewhere else now.

  The whistling didn’t have anything to do with his hearing. Nothing like tinnitus—what rock stars ended up with: the little hairs in the inner ear bending over backwards in the hurricane of noise. It ran deeper than that: the loudness of the world itself. Everything that filled it and spilled out of his TV set was deafening the very insides of him. Triggering echoes of things he had no right to be aware of.

  Betty sat back and took another long breath. He would have to decide about Betty soon—give her some indication about where he thought their relationship was heading. She would inevitably put it to him directly—she saw her life as a route through a maze, each day a turning point on the road to some hypothetical happiness. He got the feeling she wanted to turn him into a destination. He absently pressed the medal again; into the flesh at the top of his sternum, stenciling himself with it.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said all of a sudden.

  “What?”

  “What are you thinking about? You’ve got this look you get when you’re thinking about something—”

  “Yeah, so? What’s wrong with thinking?”

  The edges of her mouth pulled down, and her eyes bugged out—it was her “well-excuse-me-for-asking” look.

  Betty never thought too deeply about anything—which was what he found refreshing about her. She had an uncomplicated, uncluttered visceral response to the world around her. And finding a mind he could not instinctively penetrate was for Simon like stepping from a busy city street into the palpable calm of an ancient cathedral. There was a barrier of some kind, an opacity to her he fondly associated with his earliest memories—before the pivotal childhood illness. When people were discrete, impenetrable. Each one a door closed to him till he politely knocked.

  He could touch Betty, kiss her, make love to her, and feel only that: warm human flesh. The sensations limited to what he considered normal. Compartmentalization again.

  He remembered a song, a country song:

  She ain’t got much upstairs

  But her kitchen’s all I need . . .

  From anyone else, of course, this would be considered an insult—from him it was an insult now that he thought about it. But without a whole lot of explaining she would never understand what her vacuousness meant to him. Like some elusive quantum physics nostrum, her ability to comprehend it would drive away the point of it all.

  “Jeremy said they’d be home about ten, so we should get going, I guess,” Betty said, looking at her watch, then over at a guy at the cash register. He was fishing in his pocket and trying to balance two huge cups of something on his briefcase.

  Simon drained his cup and took out his wallet. “I think I’m going to go right home. I’m really bagged. Tell Jeremy thanks but no thanks—”

  She frowned at him. “Well if you’re not going, I’m certainly not . . .” Her voice drifted off into open-ended oblivion and she let her face drop into that fade-out-between-scenes kind of neutrality she unleashed on him whenever he disappointed her.

  She took another deep breath and it seemed to energize her; she leaned forward and peered right into his eyes. She tipped her head to one side like a puppy deciphering his master’s voice. There was a fleck of her sandwich on her cheek and most of her dark lipstick was gone—wiped away. The napkin on her plat
e looked like it had been used on the bottom of her shoe. Simon wanted to brush the crumb away but he knew she would read something into it.

  Betty reached out and took Simon’s hands in hers. She started a soundless hum and let her eyelids droop as her gaze roamed about the place again, out the window now. She was trying to make it all look ancillary, Simon figured. The unconscious body language of a seasoned relationship.

  Shit, Simon thought. Once we’re out of here, maybe if I run really fast, do a few Gene Kelly moves down an alley, I can lose her in the crowd . . . Shit.

  The word “extrication” came to mind; and how he was going to have to manage it. Real soon. He didn’t have the energy for it tonight, but if he let her come home with him he knew they would end up in bed. Which would only make the extrication process all the more difficult down the road.

  She let go of him and reached for her purse. She took out her lipstick and compact and started fixing her lips. A blow job wouldn’t be bad, he thought. Take the edge off things. That and a couple of beers. He might end up actually falling asleep at a decent hour for a change.

  Betty was already on the porch, the keys she’d snatched from him in her impatience to get out of the rain jingled as she fumbled with the fickle lock. Simon caught up to her and grasped her gloved hand and in one concise move turned it to the right—there was the smooth, pleasant thud of the retracting deadbolt—and pushed the door open. She looked over her shoulder at him. “Show-off!” she said. He could smell onions on her breath and a hint of her Amaretto coffee.

  When he opened his apartment door his answering machine was blinking at him from the bookshelf: Mother, about the check, he thought. Betty slumped onto his bed, reaching for the TV remote with her coat still on. He looked at her foot dangling over the edge of the bed, the middle toe longer than the rest, filmed in a caul of pantyhose. Her eyes were on the screen; the random blue strobe of it flattened her features, the twisted slash of her lips looking like a painted letter—Cyrillic, Persian, indecipherable, her mouth fidgeting with the flow of images like the twitching paws of a sleeping dog. When she finally looked up at him she wrinkled her nose. “This place stinks, Simon,” she said.