A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  She hadn’t done much flying in her life—once to Denver on a high school ski trip, a flight out of Newark to a job interview with a software company in Philadelphia—this had been just after college, when she had thought that starting a career would be a way of growing out of it, her old self, her real self—the one she could never escape, she had come to realize since.

  And now here she was on a plane heading for another job interview—all the way to St. Martin. Calliope had gotten her address from her brother, Tom. And being the kind of brother he was he had done some sleuthing before giving it to them. “They seem legit—into, you know, what you’re good at,” he had said on the second call to her, left in the fog of tape hiss on her ancient simulated wood-grain Radio Shack answering machine. “Call me if you need to, Pam baby. Love you.” Thomas was a landscape architect. He was good with plants and trees and seeing how they would all fit together around a house; it showed in how he dealt with everything. The way he saw her life turning out; if he could, he would prune her into something he could put a little tag on—a Latin name for what she was and where she’d come from, how much light and water she needed, what type of soil. He had lived through the days when her gift had been a curse, the times when her mother would back away from her as if she had something catching. He had spent a lot of his own childhood protecting his little sister—mostly from herself.

  What she was good at.

  The lady across the aisle from her was gasping for air all of a sudden, the fingers of her hand like four wax birthday candles pressed cold against the armrest. White and bloodless.

  “It’s okay—we’re not going to crash. I know that for a fact,” Pam said quietly. The woman kept her eyes closed; she swallowed and her breathing eased up a little. Pam wondered what people thought when she made pronouncements like that. (Sometimes she knew what they thought.) Some were hostile, most were indifferent. This woman was smiling now, in gratitude for the distraction, if nothing else. A flight attendant came by, intervening, offering a drink of water and smiling at Pam as a way of saying she was the professional and she would take over from here. Skinny legs under a blue skirt, red scarf—deep-set, tired eyes. In the instant the uniform skirt fabric brushed against her shoulder Pam picked up on the state of the poor woman’s bank account—she saw her in a leaky boat; and a man with a bailing bucket doing it all backwards, scooping the water in. That was the one thing she didn’t like about plane flights—the closeness, the forced intimacy.

  When the stewardess came back with the woman’s water Pam asked her for a Bloody Mary. That would do it—a real drink. And her Walkman—Snoop Doggy Dog; Prince’s new one. Drown it all out till she could walk away from the buzz that was building and shaping itself like an arc of iron filings around the field of her head.

  St. Martin. An island. She suddenly realized she was almost thirty and she’d never left the continental U.S. before—did Liberty Island count?—never flown over the ocean.

  What you’re good at.

  Picking out scratch-and-win lottery tickets for pocket money; that time she worked as a palm reader at an SF convention in Atlantic City. Actually touching the sweaty hands of guys with acne dressed up in tacky, handmade Star Fleet uniforms. And that fucking Fortune 2000 shit; she would never let herself get involved in anything like that again. “Calliope Associates”—she liked the sound of it—a salary plus benefits; a dental plan. Please, God. Make it happen this time. A real job for once; something I’m good at.

  She dug her bag out from between her feet and fished around till she came up with the journal she’d taken from the library of the psychic research place off Central Park West. She flipped through it, finding the entry again—June 10, 1919. Maybe Spin da’ Spool K had beaten her to it and read this book somehow—ripped it off to make his CD. Or the people at the séance had picked it up from the future, tuning in to MTV somehow.

  No. I did it. It’s all my work.

  She stuffed it back in her bag and closed her eyes, trying hard not to let her arm touch the sleeve of the man sitting next to her; he smelled of tarnished copper—that’s the only thing she could connect it with—and that old-banana chemical smell of one-hour photo places. He was reading this computer manual but she sensed he wasn’t really concentrating.

  My résumé, she thought. My eighty-year-old résumé. There was nothing she could actually put on a regular résumé, nothing that wouldn’t do more harm than good anyway—but if they asked her for one, she was ready for them.

  “I can’t bend spoons or anything like that.”

  “We don’t want you to bend spoons.”

  “In fact, most of the time I just get these voices in my head; I was once diagnosed as schizo but the doctor changed his mind when I started telling him about his girlfriend; the latest one his wife didn’t know anything about.”

  “We’re going to teach you to travel away from your body, get you into remote viewing—astral projection is what it’s traditionally known as; traveling clairvoyance—have you ever had any out-of-body experiences? Have you ever felt you’re—that you were floating away from your body?”

  “Oh, I do it all the time—not all the time but, you know—when I want to.” Jane looked over at Thornquist but he kept punching at his laptop.

  “I sort of go inside myself, close my eyes, this hiding place I used to call it, when I was a kid, like folding myself up in a warm blanket; then it sort of—I don’t know—opens up, I guess. Into this white spaciness, when it just takes off from there.” She cleared her throat and smiled, and Jane could see how her eyes did what they did—make you feel like the center of her universe; she could dilate the pupils at will. She was into her leather knapsack again, coming up with a roll of cough drops this time.

  “When I was a kid, I used to make up this place that was something like Narnia. You know those books?” Jane nodded, and Eli shifted in his chair—he had his laptop in his lap and he looked uncomfortable. “Anyway, it got kind of spooky after a while so I stopped going there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘spooky’?”

  “This one character, or creature, whatever, this little faun creature I really liked, started touching me or trying to touch me—I was only, oh, eight years old; it scared the shit out of me.”

  Jane Franklin realized then what had been puzzling her about Pam’s face—the pronounced squareness of it. Not so much a squareness—that would imply a heavy jawline—but rather the facetedness of it (a WANTED flyer on a Post Office wall would show her as two different people). The broad cheekbones defined the shape of it head-on, flattening and diminishing the nose and making her eyes seem smaller than they really were; but in profile she looked fine-boned, patrician, the line of the forehead to the tip of the nose a modulated sign wave.

  Thornquist unburdened himself of his laptop and stood up. “Do you know what psychometry is, Miss Gilford?” His hand was in his jacket pocket; he took out a small metal box. Pam thought for an instant it was cigarettes or snuff, or chewing tobacco; but he just stood there with it clenched in his liver-spotted hand. Pam noticed his nails then, how neat they looked—manicured, prided over. And she knew right away he didn’t smoke or take snuff; but he did have one vice that he kept hidden from most of his associates at Calliope.

  “The word itself is derived from the Greek. The word psyche, for ‘soul,’ and metron, meaning ‘measure.’ When you handle objects it’s not just the information you’re picking up on. It’s a process that transcends time and space—”

  “What Eli’s trying to say is, it’s more than what the mass media would have us believe.” Jane wondered what Eli was getting at; why he’d chosen this moment to make one of his speeches. She put it down to the way he’d been sitting with the laptop on his knees—the way it had channeled the blood through his old body.

  “Well. I do it, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Pamela said, pushing hair behind her ear and leaning over to put the roll of cough drops back in her bag. “All the time. I make a good livi
ng at it.” The question in both their faces prompted her to explain. “Lottery tickets, the scratch-and-win kind. I thought you knew that already.” Eli turned away from them both, then back to Jane. He was smiling and shaking his head. There was a glassiness to his eyes Jane found hard to interpret, but he kept on smiling—one of his real smiles this time.

  “You’ve got one in that box, haven’t you?” Pam said. “Minnesota State Lottery. It’s worth nothing, by the way. You wasted a buck.” She wanted to tell him to stick to roulette, but she didn’t. She would hold that back for now; just like she would hold off on showing them the book she’d taken from the psychical research library in New York.

  “I love the sixties, man. So much happened in the sixties. But the fucking tacky, blindsided seventies. Wow, fucking goofy bell-bottoms, tacky, tacky, tacky in my estimation . . . the birth of bubble gum and disco knitwear—Rococo-cola crap, man. All of it. Give me the Baroque—the restraint of the Baroque, you know what I mean? Especially the first half of the sixties . . . the Beatles’ early stuff, those first few James Bond movies . . .

  “People did outrageous stuff but were cool about it, you know? Like the Kennedy thing. Lee Harvey Oswald would probably have an album out by now if he were still alive. A whole section in Sam Goody’s right next to Ozzy Osbourne. That fucking Jack Ruby: a little shit with a little gun. Fucked up everything.” Simon laughing now, at the egregious thing he’d just said, covering up with a cool, head-dipping jive to the rumble rhythm of the Muzak, the beeps and chimes and the occasional machine-gun payoff in the background.

  He was not holding his liquor too well, Peter thought. Two beers and a slammer had brought Simon into the suburbs of fall-down-drunk.

  Late at night in a casino near Mullett Bay. Ron Koch off somewhere playing the slots; “feeling for the loose ones,” he said. In the faint blue light from neon piping around the drop ceiling that hung like an inverted Noah’s ark over the semicircular bar, Peter could see the scar on the top of Simon’s head. The scar he’d just heard the genesis of, heritage of—the day of the big diving meet that went wrong; the world’s fault, not Simon’s, the dive skewed by external influences—the blood, the stitches, the aftermath: “If it hadn’t been for that, I would’ve gone on to Seoul, you know what I mean? The Olympics.” The significance of the medal around his neck: “She gave it to me just before the last dive. My mother.” He shook his head. “Afterwards she wanted to burn it or something, grind it up and throw it in the ocean. I wouldn’t let her near it. No way, man.” He pulled it out of his shirt just in case they hadn’t noticed it yet.

  Peter took another look at his straight-up brush cut that was like a forest with a slash-and-burn clearing off to one side just beyond his hairline. A glistening blue highlighted line of oily scalp.

  Ron came over with a paper cup full of quarters and bought them all another round. Another Heineken for Peter, another slammer for Simon. “There’s a guy over there playing blackjack—hundred-dollar chips, for Christ’s sake—” He shook his head. “I swear, he was taking a hit on an eighteen. Twice he did that . . .”

  At the same time Simon was saying, “God, I love this place . . . shit,” swiveling his padded stool around to watch a young woman in a long tight skirt make her way through the crowd—taking his voice down to a stage whisper, Peter thought. Still loud as hell, though: “Look at the ass on that one. Christ, you could—”

  “You ever tried it in a place like this?” Peter said to Ron, gesturing an “out there” with his drink hand. “The way you do it with the horses?”

  Ron was shaking his head before he’d finished. “It’s not the same; it’s all chance. There’s no finesse to it, except in blackjack, maybe—a little bit of skill. All this, this random shit, too much noise—I tried it once with the 649—it’s a lottery up in Canada—the relaxation thing before I fell asleep, telling myself to dream the numbers—” He shook his head, smiling. “Numbers are hard, too abstract maybe. With horses it’s different; they’re flesh and blood, living things.” He nudged his paper cup of quarters. “The slots—I think I’m just imagining it. The luck of the draw like anybody else.”

  On cue there was a sleigh-bell jingle and clatter of a one-armed-bandit payoff somewhere on the other side of the floor; a potted siren sound and now flashing lights—car-alarm urgent, but in a good way, like New Year’s Eve.

  13

  Dancing with the weather vane at Pimlico

  “There was this horse once, this name that came to me, the night before the Preakness, back in 1973, I think it was—I must’ve been—oh, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Anyway this name comes to me in the night—this voice in my ear saying, ‘Pepper Mill’ or ‘Paper Mill’—something like that.”

  “Yeah? So what did you do?” Anita was lying on her stomach, her paperback splayed and spine-cracked under her elbow; she was smoking a cigarette with that droopy-eyed enjoyment that seemed like something from another time.

  “Nothing. I did nothing.” Ron shifted so that the chair, a collaboration of steel tubing and rubber straps, skittered for an instant as two of the legs repositioned themselves on the concrete. “It came in seventy-four to one, I found out later. If I took the trouble to check the Racing Form I would’ve seen a three-year-old named Paper Mile running that day in the third at Woodbine.”

  “You were young.”

  “Young?” He shook his head, thinking youth had nothing to do with it. “Stupid” was the word that came to mind. He said it: “I was stupid.”

  She didn’t disagree with him but got up on one knee in a slow, economical swivel till she was sitting facing him—somewhere along the way she’d managed to get one last drag out of her cigarette and stub it out in her Coke can. She was wearing her floral job today, Ron noticed—the one with a short fringe like a tennis skirt attached to it.

  “Couple of years ago I was helping the police in Iowa to find this young kid who had taken his father’s brand-new four-by-four out for the weekend with some of his buddies; he never showed up where they were supposed to meet—vanished into thin air. They found the vehicle two weeks later on a container ship heading for, Singapore, I think it was. They called me in to help track him down and I kept getting this flash of a parking garage, car noises, car alarms amplified by all those, you know, bouncing off the walls? I kept telling myself that’s impossible, the kid’s hometown had nothing like a parking garage anywhere near the place.” For a moment, she looked off toward the ocean, where the breeze was coming from. “So I second-guessed myself and told them to concentrate on places near freeways, places near lots of traffic. Gas stations on the interstate.”

  Ron nodded, knowing what was coming, looking down at his feet—not since he was a kid had they looked like that: tanned, burned really. On top between the straps of his sandals. “A couple of days later his body showed up wedged behind a Dumpster in a Des Moines parking garage.” She said this while taking out another one of her Camels, tapping it out of the pack, hunched over like a man would do, Ron thought.

  Ronald Koch had come to the understanding that he deserved better. Not now, at this present juncture in his life—that was working out just fine, what with this fancy new job in a place where you didn’t have to comment on how nice the weather was; the people he was meeting, interesting people. One in particular, if he were to be honest about it: Anita; he was growing quite fond of Anita. He missed the track, the routine of it, being around horses all his life it was understandable, but he could see how a break from it all was doing him some good.

  What was bugging him was that he was beginning to see the potential of all those years he’d let slide by; the missed opportunities—the hunches he should have gone with.

  What they were teaching him here was absolutely incredible: they sat him in this padded chair and turned down the lights, got him to relax and wait for the pictures, the impressions of the “target.” This was the first stage, the “Passive” stage—much like picking horses. Listening to your gut.

&n
bsp; They were so happy with his progress they were fast-tracking him into the “Active” stage—actually telling him to take his mind somewhere, to ride what they called the “ether,” a sort of out-of-body thing combined with what they called “remote viewing.” Just this morning they’d given him these coordinates; three numbers and a date, November something. And he’d gone off into his trance: the “GH,” they called it—the ganzfeld/hypnagogic. And there he was, in a place that felt cold, of all things, like it was January back home in fucking Hamilton. He could hear it all too—the crowd and marching bands and the floats: huge inflated cartoon balloons on cables, the crowds lining the street, the dull gray sky over Central Park, a few flakes actually coming down, hitting the road and melting right away. It was like watching a movie—a movie you could move around in. He could smell exhaust—old exhaust, antique exhaust—pre-catalytic converter exhaust. Exhaust full of lead. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It had to be. At one point, it was as if he were standing in the crowd at ground level, but above it all at the same time—dangling at the end of a guy wire like Mickey Mouse.

  What he noticed just before he lost it—he couldn’t have been there more than a minute—was that all the men were wearing hats, fedoras, some with scarves over their ears but with a fedora on top of it. Lots of wool coats and rubber galoshes—clean white shirts and ties. The forties or early fifties—he was surrounded by men and women dressed like his uncles and aunts, like when he was a kid and they came to visit for the holidays, only this time he was looking down on them, not up. An adult among adults.

  When he came out of it he went through the routine interview session; he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he’d given it a bit more effort he could have made a place for himself there, not just seen it and felt it, but actually been there, physically, in the crowd on that day back in 1955 or whenever it was.