A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “Yeah? Well it suits me fine.”

  “No. I mean really. It smells.”

  He moved to the small fridge he kept under the window; condensation was rolling down the glass onto a pile of newspapers, onto the wrinkled island of mildew that changed with the weather. Alaska, it looked like today. Last week, he had seen Jay Leno’s chin. Some of it was getting on to his stack of vintage Beatles albums that were piled on the floor beside the fridge—some of the covers were beginning to curl. His White Album not so white anymore.

  Simon opened the fridge and took out what he realized then was his last bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and handed it to Betty. “It’s the rain, something in the carpets—”

  “She’s letting that dog in again—I don’t know how you put up with it,” Betty said, straightening up against the headboard and taking the beer without a word. (“She” being the word she used for the people he shared the house with: Janis and Jeff—and Jeff’s dog.) Crossing her legs, getting comfortable on his bed with her ratty leather coat on. “You don’t have to, you know.” The implication being, you can move in with me.

  “I like it just fine,” he said again, more to himself this time; moving over to the bookcase, thinking it would be nice if she offered him some of the beer—but how was she to know it was the last one? He pushed the play button of his answering machine harder than he had to—hoping she would pick up on it—the loudness of the click; that it would carry across the room over the faint squeal and squall of the TV. He looked over at Betty, her face radiant, carried off by a laugh track. He wondered if he could ever compete with that, why he bothered. The last time they made love she’d insisted on leaving the TV on through it all. Timing her orgasm with a commercial so she wouldn’t miss any of the show.

  “Hello. This is a message for Simon Hayward. It’s Eli Thornquist calling, Calliope Associates. It’s about a job, Mr. Hayward—quite a good one as a matter of fact—if you’re interested at all. You can get me at . . .” He’d guessed wrong—or maybe not; he sensed there was a connection to his mother one way or another. His first impulse was to play the message again, but he touched his medal instead, three times.

  5

  I know what a rose is . . . you ain’t no rose.

  Peter and Larry were in the “Refectory,” the lounge off the terrace by the pool. Couches, a big TV in the corner, a steady breeze from the ocean. Coffee right there, all the time; a bowl of fresh fruit; muffins. This was where they came to meet the other recruits as they showed up. Not formally meet them—that wasn’t the drill—but one at a time, two at a time, drifting in off the terrace, or in from the pool.

  “I can get there from here—the there, there. You know what I mean? The other side of here? I used to be a kid who couldn’t speak and now—Jesus, dictionaries, libraries of fucking dictionaries.” Larry talked with his body as much as his mouth. He stood leaning against the wall by the coffee urn and pumped out the words with his tattooed forearms—old tattoos, Vietnam vintage, with fading dragons and mottoes. He had a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other; Peter could see ash ready to fall as he windmilled and conducted his words; the coffee seemed to float on gimbals—somehow he didn’t spill a drop. “I get laryngitis, from talking all the time. In here, in my head, that kind.” Larry with a cigarette in his mouth now, fighting the line of smoke, trying to squint it away. “Sometimes I get so caught up in it, what they have to say, I don’t stop to take a breather. And the pictures. I’ve always had the pictures, on and off—way before the voices. Workaholic.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s me. If it’s working, it doesn’t feel like work. You know what I mean?” A quick shot of coffee, then back at it.

  “My late brother used to say, be careful with it, don’t let it take over your life—but what does that mean, really? In the end. Life takes over your life.”

  His shirt had a faint blue-gray stain about the size and shape of a melting Dalí pocket watch just under the breast pocket from a leaky pen sometime in the distant past—a shirt with a tab collar, a piece for the Smithsonian. Peter felt that if he touched it he would know exactly how the stain got there. That’s how far he’d progressed to this point. Or regressed, depending how you looked at it.

  Larry McEwan was another member of the Calliope group out here in paradise. He could project images onto film; from his head right through the lens of a camera. Peter had seen him do this at a sort of get-acquainted reception that had ended with Larry sending someone down to the lab for a Polaroid camera. He’d gotten Peter to point it at him and stood there staring into it like someone ready for a sword fight; his right hand poised in front of the lens—the “perfection” sign, the index finger making a circle with the thumb. When he wanted the shutter released, he pulled back his hand and yelled as if he were chopping a brick in half with his knuckles. Sometimes he used his “thing-a-ma-jig,” he said—a piece of hollow plastic pipe the size of a lipstick; but he didn’t have it with him so he had to make do with his fingers.

  He’d been trying to take a picture of Anita’s front porch. Anita Spalding was another recruit here at Calliope. A hiker, Peter thought. Probably owned expensive hiking boots. Short brown hair that seemed to hold her head like a knitted cap, a fine Roman nose. She was a psychic detective, and a freelance ghost hunter, she said. She’d go into a haunted house and feel out the “cold spots,” the vortexes of disturbance. She could see them sometimes, sense a ghost’s presence; had a knack for setting lost spirits back on the path toward the “light.” It sounded to Peter like she was more of a ghost bailiff.

  “I charge sixty dollars an hour plus expenses,” she said. She handed out business cards she kept in a small brass case. “The police work, I do for free.” Her services came with a lifetime guarantee, it said on the back—as long as you owned your home. She had a degree in structural engineering, which had led her to a job with a construction firm that did renovations in the Pittsburgh area. “And here I am.” She had turned to each of them in the small gathering with a glassy-eyed smile, as if the logic of the route that had brought her to Calliope was self-evident. The puzzled look on Larry’s face made her go on: “I started to notice things that had nothing to do with crumbling foundations or rotting beams.”

  It took Larry three tries at it before he got something—a murky picture that looked more like a dollhouse. The posts and railings of a porch, a window: black blobs in a grid of faint mullions. It turned out it wasn’t her house exactly: “That’s my aunt’s place on Chautauqua Lake,” she said, taking the still-wet Polaroid in both hands and sitting back down. It was a place she used to visit as a kid on summer vacations, she said. “A gorgeous gingerbread jewel of a place right in Chautauqua Institute.”

  Larry lit another cigarette, poured himself some more coffee, and drank it down right there at the urn; he came around to where Peter was sitting and leaned on the back of the couch so that his head hovered near Peter’s at about ten o’clock. Not saying a word; as if someone had called a time-out. He just stared off into the distance along with Peter: at the hypnotic vista of the sea and sand and all that sky. Larry smelled of old French fries and cigarettes—and in that instant Peter knew without a doubt that the shirt he was wearing had belonged to his brother.

  Larry was about to fill him in on the details now, the details of his brother’s death—Peter could feel it coming—tell him about his past. They all liked to share the same kind of story it seemed, now that they were getting comfortable with each other. Peter had been through it with Anita over lunch—the childhood stuff, the dreams, the uncanny second sight, the embarrassment of it all.

  “They got me working on videotape now,” Larry said, sitting down across from him. “Yeah.” He nodded, as if Peter were contradicting him. “Doing it right onto this machine. No camera. Look, Ma, no camera!” He laughed out loud, his mouth wide open, teeth no one deserved to see staring Peter right in the face. He wondered how a guy like Larry had managed to reach sixty-two, or fifty-two—whatever age
he was; it was hard to say—with any teeth at all. He seemed to owe it all to his brother; the one that had died; as if his brother were a poultice that had drawn all the poison out of Larry’s life. “One night we were out walking home, from somewhere, pissed out of our minds; we’re taking a shortcut along the tracks; must have sat down somewhere to take a rest—anyway we pass out right there on a siding under this freight car. There’s this horrible noise wakes me up.” He stopped to take a long drag from his cigarette. “Jesus, I—” He sniffed loudly. “This fucking train cuts him right in half.” He held up his left hand; part of the pinky and ring finger were missing. “I lose a few fingers, he loses half his fucking body.”

  Just this morning a man named Ron Koch had shown up on one of the couches—a pudgy guy about fifty, with thick graying hair, wearing black socks under his sandals and shorts that looked tight on him. An oversized T-shirt. He was holding his coffee in both hands and leaning forward, intent on something. Peter had gone over and introduced himself, nodding his way through that moment that called for a handshake—no one at Calliope shook hands, or gave someone a peck on the cheek. The place had the formality of a country inn, rather than a weekend retreat—it did when Larry wasn’t around, at least. Touching people, for Peter now, was like rummaging through their medicine cabinet.

  “I’ve never seen so much color. I’m not used to color.” Ron Koch gestured out toward the terrace with his cup, the dazzle beyond it. The young pool attendant was arranging the lounge chairs again and Peter wondered whether complexion was the focus of his comment, but he put his cup down and leaned to one side and pulled something from his back pocket: a wad of folded paper, dollar bills—some of them odd-looking. Canadian currency: blues and purples—scrawled notes, receipts. He came up with the crumpled remains of his plane ticket and a travel brochure—“Sint Maarten—St. Martin” in psuedo-casual lettering across the generic shot of the anorexic model in the yellow two-piece. All set against turquoise water, white sand, green palms—the blinding sky-blue sky.

  “It’s just like the picture, I couldn’t believe it coming over here from the airport.” He folded it all up and dutifully stuffed it back in his pocket. “The only thing missing in the brochure is guys like me.” He smiled and picked up his cup again. There was a pace to him, Pete realized then, a sort of internal metronome that set the tempo for everything he did and said. He was looking around him now—a maid came in with a trolley and started working on the coffee station—while his foot tapped every third beat, then every fifth, tapping through the silences, his index finger doing the job for him against his foam cup. Peter sensed he was a good dancer when he was in the mood: a guy who could pull off a presentable fox-trot.

  “How much they paying you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What are they paying you? I don’t usually ask stuff like that—it’s none of my business—but I can’t figure out what they want for this kind of money—”

  “I think they want our time, if nothing else, our talents—they must have told you something. ESP experiments, remote viewing?”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes I see a name on the Racing Form, it’s crossing the finish line in my head. I pick winners. Is that ESP?” His head wobbled back and forth; he was dickering with himself. “I’m what’s called a professional handicapper. People don’t realize how much legwork’s involved. The hunches come with the legwork.” There was noise in the background now, a woman’s laughter. He tapped at his coffee cup, glancing over his shoulder with a quick turn of his head. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “The problem is, some of them end up crossing the finish line last. People only remember the winners. That’s how they found me, anyway—word of mouth.”

  Anita came over and introduced herself. She was wearing a flowery, loose-fitting shift and sandals; a straw sun hat in her hand and a big canvas bag over her shoulder—she was heading for the beach, she said, “With a good book, a bottle of mineral water and my Camels.”

  “I grew up with the horses,” Ron continued after a few beats of watching Anita cross the patio. “My uncle was a trainer for a while when I was a kid. I raced ponies till I was about twelve, then I started growing. Cut school and spent all my time at the track after that; all my money. Other than being a parimutuel clerk for a couple of years, this is the first real job I’ve ever had.”

  The next time he saw Ron Koch the coffee cup and the socks were gone, his tempo down to something like a slow waltz; he was out by the pool studying a map of Europe and joking with Anita, who was stretched out on her stomach sunning herself and reading her fat paperback.

  The next time he caught sight of Larry was through the half-open door of the “Remote Imaging” lab. He was on a recliner much like the one Peter was familiar with—but his ankles and wrists were tied down with wide Velcro straps; and instead of the ganzfeld rig over his eyes he was wearing an elaborate set of goggles that looked like something an optometrist would use.

  “What’s with the restraints?”

  “Larry flails around a bit when he goes through,” the techie said. He introduced himself as Mike Blenheim, Lab Supervisor. “Going through” was how the technicians short-formed the slow descent into theta. “It’s for his own protection really, and ours too. Susan over there got a nasty bruise on her arm from his gyrations—we think it’s got something to do with his long friendship with the bottle.”

  On the other side of the lab a battery of video monitors dribbled numbers and bar graphs and the largest one, over by Larry, flickered with the snow-flocked image of what looked like a Greek temple: the classic columns, the pediment, the wide steps—it kept moving as if the camera angle were changing all the time: the viewpoint now above, now off to one side, then head-on but at something like knee level—“We’ve got a beacon in Athens, at the Acropolis. It’s my wife, by the way.” He looked Peter straight in the eye as if he were confessing something. “She’s really good at this sort of thing—she’s a good transmitter, it turns out. Anyway, what you’re looking at is the Parthenon. The only difference is this one has seven columns across the front instead of eight. The details we can work on later.”

  “Where’s she heading for next?”

  “Pardon?” Blenheim was looking at the printout of Larry’s EEG—something like that—wavy lines in three colors; he was lost in it as in a good book.

  “Your wife. What’s the next target?”

  “We don’t know. It’s part of the exercise—the double-blind provision. A random number generator’s basically making that decision as we speak.”

  Peter couldn’t stop it—the image came to him like an ice cube on bare skin—a tower, the tower: the one with the famous lean. He wondered if Larry would even notice.

  “After this run we send Larry out on his own. No beacon, just target coordinates.”

  “And after that?”

  “We’re going to see if he can come up with something from the last century. Nothing of any historical significance. Just a scene, an urban scene, something recognizable, verifiable.”

  Larry let out a gasping moan just then, and his back arched for a moment. Susan, Blenheim’s assistant, reached his side as the device over his eyes started to come away from his face. He began to mumble then, as if he were talking in his sleep, a hoarse muttering that drifted into labored breathing. “Bring him out of it,” Blenheim said. “I don’t like the sound of that.” His eyes were on the monitor, the big one, the one that had been picking up the jerky views of the Parthenon.

  It was black now, except for a small point of light that seemed to be getting bigger. A headlight, Peter thought. A single headlight in a murky gray of random reflections and flickers; but then he realized what it was, what it had to be. He went over to Larry and grabbed the nearest hand—papery, nicotine-stained fingers, palsied, limp, oblivious to his touch—and Peter knew exactly what was going on, where Larry’s mind had wandered off to. He was trying to stop a train.

  6

  . . . she goes by the na
me of “Mother”

  Peter put a call in to Celia and she told him she had a copy of the contract and once he signed it his first paycheck would be on its way to his bank account. It wasn’t a performance contract as such, so she wasn’t getting her fifteen percent, but she made it plain she was more than happy with the finder’s fee they’d given her. She didn’t want to lose him—he could see that; he could hear it in her voice.

  “Calliope wants you for their research and development department—‘Applied Psi,’ it says here. I had to look that up—something to do with the paranormal, supposedly. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they picked you, Peter, an actor.”

  She droned on for a while about minutiae: Actors’ Equity—how he didn’t have to pay dues at all if he didn’t want to; how he’d probably get some of this year’s back—which was another “plus.” He was tired all of a sudden, from all these details that told him he wasn’t really an actor anymore—from inactivity. He was missing the routine of his craft, the few people in the cast he could now call friends; the rhythm of his days and his dark days—the audience cheering him on. The adrenaline rush after a good show.

  He rang off as quickly as he could and walked out on to the balcony, into the scent of hibiscus and parched grass. The sun was low in the sky and the rosy glow from the west made a peach ice-cream mountain out of the cloud hanging over the tiny volcanic island of Saba.