A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  He went over to the closet and took down the small tin box Thornquist had given him. He could feel the spot where Thornquist had left a partial thumbprint—it came to him as a tactile echo of his phony smile. A threshold Peter could cross if he wanted to, the lines of the thumbprint loaded with information, like the iridescent swirl on a CD—data folded into data. Waiting.

  He lay down on the bed with it on his chest—his cotton shirt between him and the box itself; he didn’t want Eli’s noise breaking up the signal. After a moment or two he decided it was something with writing on it; a slogan. A moment later there it was—the heel of a shoe. He was sure of it now, a brown rubber heel with the words OIL RESISTANT on it—something you’d see in the dingy window of a shoe-repair place. And now Eli again—Eli had been the last to touch it—his thoughts about it now, about shoes, heels. The flashing vision of a shoe coming down on an insect. A spider.

  He threw the box on the bed and headed for the door. He needed a drink and then he needed to talk to someone—at someone. Say anything that came to mind, stand up in front of a crowd of people and spout the lines of any play or show or silly scrap of a commercial he’d ever been part of—as long as the words were coming out of his mouth and not his head. Something from Hamlet, or Gilligan’s Island, maybe. It didn’t really matter.

  If he ended up alone down there, he would be stuck with just memories, he would find himself with one of the endless loops he played over and over against the scrim behind his eyes.

  “Look at that one. Is that her?”

  A little boy who had just learned that his name was the same as his father’s—“Peter.” But the word “Mom” was in his head now, which, like “Mother,” he knew to be a name connected with a father—most of the children at school seemed to have a complete set: Mom and Dad; Father and Mother—and the children he saw on television always did. Mom ’n’ Dad. Mom ’n’ Dad. Mom ’n’ Dad. One thing, indivisible.

  “She’s not my Mom.” He stood with his right hand wrapped around two of his father’s fingers. His left shoe tapped at a shallow puddle.

  “No. You’re right; she isn’t. Try that one, the one with the dog. Go on. Say ‘Hello.’”

  This was a game his father played when he’d had too much to drink. He would take Peter out somewhere—someplace crowded, busy, a shopping center or a park downtown—it had been Cleveland, he later discovered—and tell him to go find his mother. To just start looking around the place, as if he’d misplaced a toy, or somehow got separated from her for a minute and she was there beyond the barrier of legs and coats and chattering feet and pyramids of canned peas—as eager to find him as he was her.

  “Go on. Go find your mother.”

  In time he learned how to approach these women and linger with them just long enough to satisfy his father. To know just what to say. He found he could disarm the confusion of these strangers and wipe away the suspicion on their faces by pretending to be less needy than he really was; by making them smile—even laugh sometimes.

  Eventually he found the knack of delving into their lives, even if he came up with just a torn fragment, a snatched purse of truncated images. The touch of a shopping bag; the fleeting grasp of a scarf; the smell of perfume—sometimes his face brushing against a coat would be enough. So if the day ever came when he did find his mother and she saw him for what he was (there would be tears of recognition; her eyes would dwell on the details of his face; she would crush him against her scented waist and he would never have to hold his breath again), he would have scraps of something to offer in return. This is a part of you, I own it too; it’s mine. It always has been.

  This is how you make people laugh, one of his acting coaches told him later. You give them something they already have, a way of looking at things they thought only ever belonged to them.

  When he was five or six he started having the dream where his father throws him from a bus or a taxi cab: a recurring version of the game—distorted, frantic. In the dream there was always the feeling that this was his last chance—if he didn’t find his mother, his father would leave him too, dissolve like a lump of sugar. The familiar sweet scent of him (it wasn’t till much later that he made the connection) would evaporate or turn into car exhaust. In the dream, as the cab pulled away, the slamming door was like a falling blade. But his mother was always waiting for him on the sidewalk, so that his father’s departure was academic; the panicked cab ride a transitional government, the slamming door a coup d’état.

  And his father did end up abandoning him—in a way—not long after the dreams took over a night or two out of every month. He left him with nothing more substantial than his first name: “Peter.”

  When he came home from school that last day three huge men kept him from going up to the apartment—an apartment over a storefront in Marquette, Michigan. A policeman was standing in the street with the landlord, along with another man with a loud voice and a lot of keys hanging from his belt. Then an old woman (looking back on it now she couldn’t have been more than fifty) took him in a car to an office building and sat him down with a Coke from a machine in the hallway; then she told him his father had “passed on.” In his child’s mind he saw his father floating away, purposefully drifting off, his feet dangling inches from the floor—carried away by the Upper Michigan wind.

  They never did find Peter’s birth certificate; his father had been living on a disability pension under the name of “Andrews.” Peter was registered at his school as “Peter Andrews” but he later discovered he had been listed as “Peter Anderson” back in Cleveland.

  After that he became a ward of the state; Social Services invented a birth date for him: March 1, 1963. He was eventually adopted by his second set of foster parents, Timothy and Marion Abbott. He now had an official word to tag on the end of “Peter”—his third and last stage name. And someone he could call “Mother,” at last. As real as any mother could be.

  He never did find out his real birth date or who his biological mother was. In his mind she had become a mythic amalgam of all the nameless women he remembered approaching as a small child—and part of him wanted to keep it that way.

  7

  Simon says, “Do this.”

  “Are you going to be back for Christmas?”

  They were sitting on the steps outside the central library—Simon had a coffee in his hand and a copy of a book about John Lennon he’d just taken out on Betty’s library card.

  “Probably not,” Simon said. “See how things work out. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I could come see you? Get some time off work, if old what’s-her-face’ll let me go.” Old what’s-her-face was Betty’s boss at the fabric store. She was finishing up a chocolate-covered croissant, flicking the flakes from her fingers and wiping her hands on her jeans. The sun was out today but a wind funneled through the towering scroll-on-end structure of the library’s entrance whipped the dust and litter into visible chaos.

  “I don’t know. It’s not that kind of setup. More exclusive. Sort of an intense training deal. No visitors supposedly—that kind of thing.” He was making some of it up to ward her off. The guy from Calliope Associates said they would like to fly him down to St. Martin, an island in the Caribbean—for an interview.

  Away from the Vancouver rain—that in itself was reason enough for Simon. An interview that could lead to a job. As a psychic, of all things. “Remote viewing, information gathering mostly—for corporate clients . . . No, nothing to do with infomercials and Psychic Hotlines . . .” this Calliope person had said on the phone. “Eli,” his name was: Eli Thornquist.

  Great. Fine. Whatever. The money was good and he needed the money. The odd part-time bartending thing and his mother’s occasional checkbook largesse were not doing the trick anymore. Thornquist had asked him when it would be convenient to fly out of Vancouver, how long he would need to “get his affairs in order.” They would FedEx the ticket in two or three days. It sounded like something from a bad made-for-TV movie; but h
e’d go along for the ride. That was a good one: “get his affairs in order.”

  “I’m really going to miss you, Simon.” Betty was hugging her purse and staring down at the ground. Her hair was covering her face and all Simon could see was the part down the middle of her head. Her roots were showing—her natural mousy brown.

  A guy in spandex and a helmet pulled up on his bicycle and shackled it to the wrought-iron grillwork around one of the young trees that lined Homer Street in front of the library. The noise made her look up and Simon could see tears in her eyes—tears ready to spill over the barriers of mascara and run down her cheeks. Jesus, he thought. I should never have let myself get in this deep. The word “extrication” came to mind again and it seemed to be more of a tongue twister than it had the other day. More of a convoluted mouthful.

  I don’t need this shit, he told himself. Barnacle City, big time. “Stuck on You” time. That old Elvis song with the line about wild horses. That’s what I need right now—lots of horsepower.

  Get her out of my life; tear us apart. He said this to himself or to his higher self; he felt the weight of the words deep inside him, but at the same time it was as if they had sailed off somewhere into outer space, circled the universe, and come back around to slap the back of his head. Providence or Fate or some such abstract label for the powers that be seemed to be falling down on him out of the glaring, sheet-metal-gray sky. He felt a galvanic tingle along his arm and across his chest. His St. Christopher medal seemed adhered to his skin—stuck on you . . . He stood up and threw his coffee cup into the trash bin at the bottom of the steps. Betty followed him, and as he turned around to look at her she wiped one eye with the heel of her hand.

  “Here. You better take this; I don’t think I’m going to have time to read it before I leave anyway.” He handed her the John Lennon biography and she stuffed it in her bag.

  “Get me an address, okay? And a phone number?” She took his arm and wrapped both of hers around it; he could feel the weight of her—many eggs’ worth of weight—and as they walked off, her large purse, burdened now with the John Lennon book, gently slapped his thigh.

  They headed up Robson Street into the glare of the sun. They were going to a used-record store and after that a noodle place on Granville Street near the Orpheum Theater. Their last meal together was the plan—before he went away. “For good,” he was going to tell her in the restaurant. Even if this psychic thing didn’t work out he wasn’t coming back for very long. He’d come back to Vancouver to clear out his apartment, then head on out to Chicago. Stay with his mother for a bit; check out the bartending situation out there. That’s what he planned to tell her—there was no way he could spend a fucking day with his mother, never mind live with her, but, hey, you say what you have to say. “Expediency” was the word for it, wasn’t it? One of those ends-justify-the-means words. Like “extricate.” An arm’s-length word.

  “Jeremy did my chart? It says we’re sort of really matched astrologically—Libra and Aquarius. Did you know that?”

  “How would I know that. Horoscopes are fucking bullshit.”

  “How can you be a psychic and not believe in astrology?”

  “I’m not a psychic, okay? Weird shit happened to me when I was a kid so they figure I can do this stuff.” He pulled away from her, disengaging his arm with the help of the other one. “It’s bullshit, okay?” As she finally let go of him he felt the tingle of energy again: a shiver of warmth running down through his head and into his chest.

  The voices—they weren’t bullshit, but he wasn’t going to get into that now. The stuff that had happened to him when he was a kid: that too had nothing to do with all this New Age TV horoscope shit—one-eight-hundred-rip-me-off. But she wouldn’t understand that either. Jesus. How in the hell did I ever let it get this far? “It’s all, FUCKing, BULLshit,” he said then, louder than he’d wanted to. He had come to a halt and was brushing at his sleeve, swiping at his overcoat, as if her hands had left a trail of crumbs and chocolate from her pastry—or some of her wet mascara.

  He looked up at her and she was crying again. “I love you, Simon,” she said, in a way that was more like a question than a statement. Or a statement that demanded as weighty an answer.

  He turned away without saying anything and moved ahead of her, striding up Robson through the late-afternoon crowd: people on inline skates and businessmen and baby-faced teenagers with cell phones. A guy with a scraggly beard was holding out a Styrofoam cup, his check sport jacket soiled to the texture and color of the gravel in the parking lot he was standing next to, his shredded white sneakers as unwhite as the white line in the center of the street—his outfit like camouflage, Simon figured. Some kind of accelerated, evolutionary, urban survival mechanism.

  Betty called out to him but he kept going. He decided he wanted to make the light of the next big intersection, get across it before the light changed, so he pretended not to hear her. Richards Street clogged with pre-rush hour traffic; not gridlocked yet. Nervous Mercs and Pathfinders trying to cut through strings of pedestrians at the corner.

  He made it to the other side of the street, then turned to see where she was. Betty was running after him toward the intersection, her hand pushing down on her big shoulder bag so it wouldn’t bounce around. She had platform shoes on and he could see she was having difficulty moving that fast. Jesus, she’s such a fucking bimbo.

  He held up his hand as if to tell her to stop right there where she was, not to try running the light; but as his hand came up an odd twist of perspective made the scene before him flatten. There she was, half framed in the space between his outstretched thumb and index finger, no bigger than the span of his hand: Betty a little doll four inches high all of a sudden, an insubstantial paper doll of a figure racing up to the curb; the cars and trucks like Tonka toys, playthings. And instead of the gesture holding her back on the sidewalk, it seemed to do the opposite.

  As his hand came down (it was as if she were stuck to it, pulled by the tingle in his arm, the static electricity at the ends of his fingers), it dragged the Betty doll toward him. She stepped right out into the street.

  It was one of those luxury Japanese cars—pastel curves coming fast around the corner, trying to get through before the cross traffic started moving, making a swift right turn between the clusters of pedestrians still crossing Richards Street—one of the Tonka toys coming right for her as she stepped off the curb. The unfolding of what happened next seemed ineluctable; the interlocking elements of the scene were choreographed in the same way that a dropped pebble connects with a still pool.

  The streamlined hood of the car scooped her up, so that her legs seemed to fly off to the left. Her shoes were flung from her feet like shrapnel; one of them bounced off a newspaper box and her purse came loose. Her hip came down hard on the hood with a muffled, timpanic thud, which was followed by the thwack of her head hitting the windshield—all of this was underscored with the chirpy screech of the car’s tires. She slid off the front of the car and ended up out of sight on the other side of it. A woman beside Simon shrieked and gasped out an “Oh my God.” He heard a man’s voice next to his ear saying, “Holy shit.” There was a silence then, as if between movements—no clapping—as it all played itself out to the denouement: onlookers formed a crater of concern; one of them came forward, the one who knew CPR—a doctor maybe; then the conscientious few who tried to prove the value of owning a cellular phone started punching away. An aviary clamor of 9-1-1’s chirped around him.

  Simon watched and held back, not saying a word. He thought to himself, Jesus, that was weird. He thought about the sensation in his chest as he’d held up his arm. That’s never happened before. He was a little dizzy, but he felt good. A bit spacey was all, like he’d just come out of a short nap. Like that time when he was a kid; the day his friend Billy’s dog had died.

  He walked over to where Betty’s bag was lying in the road. Her stuff was all over the place. Stuff he recognized: her wallet and her
makeup, bits of crumpled paper. Hard candies he actually remembered her taking one time, in a restaurant, from the little brown tray with the “Visa” logo stamped on it. (He had paid for the meal and she’d taken both of the complimentary mints.) He found the book they had just got out of the library underneath a parked car. John Lennon peering right at him from the shadows. It was a picture probably taken right around the time the movie A Hard Day’s Night came out, Simon figured. John was posed looking right into the lens with his chin resting on the sleeve of what looked like a pretty spiffy Harris tweed jacket. The words JOHN LENNON were spelled out in gold type above his glossy, momma’s boy, Beatles cut.

  Simon picked the book up and put it in the pocket of his overcoat as best he could, then changed his mind and jammed it inside his coat instead, under the armpit. He moved away from the purse and the stuff on the road and slowly drifted through the gathering crowd toward Granville Street. The ambulance was blaring its way through the congealed traffic now; a cop was trying to open up a space for it.

  A library book on Betty’s card. Like, who in his right mind would actually go out and try and collect the nickel-a-day or whatever it was on an overdue book taken out by a dead person?

  Bonus.

  8

  My Rod and my Staff shall comfort me . . .

  “I was concerned about the flight number—‘443.’ It’s my age with a four in front of it, the ‘4’ meaning, you know, heaviness, dullness. Which didn’t strike me as being too, what’s the word?—auspicious a number for a safe flight. Sometimes you just got to hold your nose and jump, you know? Jump into the river of things. So here I am.”

  Some people have a gift for driving people away—a knack for making it obvious to the world they are meant to be alone. They go through life screaming for affection, a deafening roar of neediness pouring out of them.