A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  The technician assigned to him for the session, Blenheim, looked at Ms. Franklin and said, “That’s a good sign, wouldn’t you say?” His voice was like some radio announcer’s voice, and Ron lay there in the recliner thinking, this guy could say anything and people would listen to him with a voice like that. Women especially, he figured. His own voice always seemed squeaky whenever he heard it on tape.

  The oddest thing was Ms. Franklin asking him his age again, the year he was born—stuff he’d already told them that first day he was here. He told them again: “Nineteen-forty-five, June eighteenth,” and Blenheim wrote it down on the big yellow pad he always used for these “debriefings.” Big letters, hard with his pen, as if he were trying to push it through onto the other pages so it would be there for every session, big and bold like his voice.

  “We’ll have to be careful of that in the future,” Ms. Franklin said then. Ron had no idea what that meant—that he was too old for this sort of thing? Maybe his astrology was off—no Geminis on Apollo missions? He didn’t bother asking. If he started he wouldn’t be able to stop. He was used to taking orders and doing things by rote; doing things that didn’t make sense. Working around horses you learn sometimes to look the other way and just get on with it.

  But this all got him to thinking: if he could go back and see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and actually feel the cold, smell the place, maybe he could do more than just observe—which is all they wanted him to do. Maybe he could actually open his mouth and make a noise back there. Maybe he would try that the next time, try and grab someone by the arm and scream in their face—see what happens. Get right out there on the road in the middle of the fucking parade itself and do a little dance; grab one of the pretty women from the crowd and do the tango, maybe.

  14

  . . . finding vertical with a broken wing

  Simon called Janis at the house in Vancouver and told her if she settled up with the landlord for him and cleaned out his apartment she could take anything she wanted—sell the rest, whatever, give it away—he wasn’t coming back. Yes, even his new Bose stereo system. He’d left with three suitcases full of most of his clothes and all of his Beatles records.

  His White Album: the cover was stained and mildewed, the records themselves gray with minute scratches and dust; but his new CD version had turned the original into a museum piece—the aging, yellowing cover seemed appropriate now, like the wattles under Paul McCartney’s chin.

  Simon tried to recall when he’d first heard it; whether his parents had played it around the house or in the car when he was small—to him the Beatles were ancient history by the time he started listening to music—or whether it all came out of the Manson connection, how Manson had been obsessed with the White Album, the lyrics telling him to kill. Helter Skelter. Revolution 9.

  He’d bought this particular copy in a used-record store on Granville Street after seeing a documentary about Charles Manson on TV. He’d watched this guy blather on about Revelation and getting clear and how Hitler had “leveled the karma of the Jews” or some such shit, but he couldn’t help noticing what he did with his eyes, how they launched more than they took in.

  In his room at Calliope, he took the White Album out of his suitcase and placed it on the dresser, opening it up like a greeting card. The reflection in the mirror making the whole thing into an X of dirty white—a double, double album. What would the mirror image of a record sound like? The same? Different? But how? Like those chemical compounds with a right-hand and a left-hand version, the molecules asymmetrical, how one could be a benign carbon chain and the other a deadly poison. He remembered how the song “Revolution 9” had this strange baritone chant running through it that sounded like, “Nubba Ny-un, Nubba Ny-un, Nubba Ny-un”; how when you played it backwards it turned out to be a voice saying something like “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.”

  Watching the fuss the world had made of Manson, Simon couldn’t figure out why this jerk who had done so many despicable things could end up as famous as Jesus Christ. Almost as famous as John Lennon.

  There was something about fame that had always confounded him: how someone can take on an importance that seems to hold itself up by its own bootstraps. The echoes of it in magazines or on TV transcending the physical source of it all. The person diminished by personality. Like the old joke about the cyst on the guy’s nose getting so big it ends up having the guy removed.

  Like that actor who was working here at Calliope: Peter something. Reasonably successful, it sounded like, good-looking, he guessed, for a guy his age—thirty-two, thirty-five, maybe—no beer gut yet, still had all his hair. But a nonentity as far as the big picture was concerned. Where the person ended and the personality began he couldn’t tell.

  There were times when Simon saw himself as a diver still—a celebrated athlete—a diver who had gone on to the Seoul Olympics in ’88, won a medal for his country, his face on the front of a Wheaties box—this other Simon living a parallel life to his own, this golden boy who hadn’t smashed his head on that diving board when he was sixteen. One small mistake and in the eyes of the world you become a cipher.

  It don’t matter a fuck what you do—just make sure the whole world knows you did it—YOU did it! That’s what he saw in Charlie Manson’s eyes. Personality, in the end, bigger than good or evil—in a league by itself.

  His dream was that one day he could sit down at a computer and do a search on the Net—just key in his name: Simon + Hayward, and come up with about 624,291 hits. That’s what it was all about.

  Simon’s headache had gone and the ringing was now a faint harmonic of the susurrating sea beyond his window. Something to do with the weather, the lifting of the clouds, air pressure on his inner ear, he figured.

  He was growing to like it here; the sunshine linked inextricably to daylight. The sun would come up and you could track it in the cloudless sky all day. And what they were actually paying him to do—he’d always thought of as a secret disability, a guilty pleasure.

  They had shown him the relaxation technique with the Ping-Pong balls on his eyes. They had set up a situation where he was supposed to rise out of his body and see what was in the room above the lab. He’d done this kind of thing when he was a kid, at night when he couldn’t sleep. He used to call them his “Night Dives.” He’d contort this other part of himself out of his body and do flips and somersaults up near the ceiling. As a child he’d never been able to get any farther than that.

  In the last session they’d wanted him to check out the room on the floor above and report back to them, as if he were a spy behind enemy lines. He’d approached it like a dive off the springboard, the rhythm of it like a dance; he remembered what his coach had taught him about how to use a song to pace himself: “When you push off you should hear the board bounce twice before you come back down on it.”

  He’d used “Blackbird” this time—from the White Album:

  . . . up, out of himself—a slow tumble, legs together, straightening, headfirst through the stucco ceiling. A big empty attic space, a steel box, hovering now, among the exposed rafters, poised between moves. His kinetic memory still working for him. Orienting him.

  Down toward the steel box on the floor in the center of the room, an effortless glide, head, eyes, slicing through the lid.

  His medal clanging like a banged pot lid sliding into dishwater as it passed through the walls of the box. But it was only a replica of his medal. Everything I’m wearing here with me—my clothes, even my fillings—what’s left of my breakfast, he thought.

  In the box he found a roll of film: standard 35 mm, Kodak; he let his hand linger, feeling the slick surface, then down into the layers of exposed emulsion. This shot, that, one after the other, the first exposure an image of paper folded into the form of a bird—a crane, an origami crane out of newspaper. The next one an upturned silver goblet, the next a lighthouse on a craggy coastline. A head-and-shoulders shot of a young woman with
what looked like a compact disc between her teeth; a picture of an antique bus parked beside an office building—he worked through the whole roll: twenty-four exposures in all.

  Simon knew what they were up to—it was like an eye chart; they wanted to see how deeply he could penetrate this multileveled pastiche of odd data, how far down the line of connections he could go before it all blurred his inner vision.

  He opened his eyes and stretched; Jane Franklin’s face, wide-eyed, unblinking, inches from his—the scent of her like coming home. He swallowed and sat up; Blenheim handed him a glass of water.

  “Well?” Jane said, sitting down, picking up a pad and pulling off the top of her pen with her teeth, ready to roll. Ready to play with their new toy, Simon thought.

  “Well what?”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Big goose egg.”

  “‘Nothing’? You were into theta in less than thirty seconds,” Blenheim said, coming around to face him. He looked saddened by it all, rather than frustrated.

  “Well I just—nothing happened, okay? A bit of a light show, random shit, you know—but no out-of-body, sorry.”

  Jane looked up from her pad. “You want to give it another go?” Big brown eyes smiling at him with a playful pleading, a bit of pout about the lips. The way her long neck turned into her chin line. How could he lie to the prospect of maybe one day in the near future—“I don’t think I can go through that again today. I really, I really gave it my best shot. Maybe tomorrow. Okay?”

  He would keep them in the dark for now, keep them guessing. Not let on how much progress he was making. Not show his hand right away.

  And besides; Jane might be there for him—after hours, maybe—to help him with his homework.

  15

  . . . see your face in the palm of my hand

  “What’s his problem?”

  “That’s Peter Abbott. He doesn’t usually look like that—hope he’s all right.”

  “What does he usually look like?”

  Jane Franklin opened the door to the security area and let Pam go in ahead of her. “Like that—only not so you’d notice.”

  There are times when you meet someone and the moment passes into oblivion; it gets filed away along with all the other random stuff. Then there are the moments, the pivotal moments, that end up like the pages in an old address book—wrinkled and creased and folded and unfolded till they feel like soft fabric, the edges like the fur on the bridge of a cat’s nose. Peter’s vague memory of meeting Pamela Gilford for the first time was one such moment.

  He’d been out in the hallway trying to shake off the attentions of a techie who was insisting he rest a while longer in the recliner. They were giving him real assignments now, remote viewing sessions aimed at specific information. This one had been the location of the black box of a downed 747 in the Aegean Sea—somewhere off the coast of Crete. The session had not gone well at all.

  As Pamela Gilford came toward him—Ms. Franklin was giving her a tour of the lab—she raised her hand and stopped Jane in midsentence and waited for Peter to pass by—as if he were going to confront them with something, attack them. He remembered her face being a blur for a second, as if it were a TV report about some alleged felon whose identity they had to conceal. But he did have a memory of long, straight hair—this cowl of sixties hair that fell from a part down the middle of her head. Brown hair with coppery highlights. Of how pale she looked standing there next to Jane. And he believed he’d actually seen her eyes in there somewhere—he believed this; he had to believe this.

  The blur he attributed to his state of mind, the fatigue of a remote viewing session that had gone wrong. They had realized by now that Peter worked best with what they called a PL, a “psychometric link,” that his sense of touch was what connected him with a target; and they’d presented him with a fragment of a fold-down tray from a passenger seat. He’d ended the session in a shuddering cold sweat, the jagged tray fragment clasped to his chest. He hadn’t been able to locate the flight recorder—wreckage, yes, and what must have once been passengers, remnants of passengers, but no black box. At one point he’d found himself being sucked away from the site on the sea floor down the life line of a dead crew member. Such visceral terror he never wanted to experience again.

  Pamela Gilford. Fleshed out in his revisionist mind from a glimpse of this retro-waif giving him the evil eye in the hallway. Not much to go on. The eyes of course were saying something—as his must have been. Two transmitters jamming each other’s signal—two receivers tuned into the same station: dead air and screaming feedback all at once. This too he had to believe.

  What he remembered most of all from that first meeting was the forgetting, the unconscious setting aside of it. The blur of her face, as they passed in the hall, the long hair, the pale skin, the hand coming up—it was a document that had been filed away, the cabinet slammed shut. Pivotal moments were supposed to be more dramatic than this one had been; he was an actor, for God’s sake.

  The next time he saw her was a couple of days later in the common room. She was sitting by herself, eyes closed, listening to her Walkman. The earphones held back her hair so he could really get a good look at her this time—this is the memory of her he would associate with his first impression—the cheekbones, the soft mouth that never seemed to close all the way, a gentle overbite making her teeth show a bit. She was sitting in an easy chair with her feet under her, moving, swaying to the music. Arms folded, hands lost in the sleeves of her plaid shirt, and on the chair beside her, a paper plate with crumbs, a crumpled napkin.

  She looked up at him for a second and smiled; a smile that had more to do with how she felt about the music, he figured, and he left it at that, not wanting to cut in on whomever, or whatever was on the tape. One bare foot showing—long, skinny, two-dimensional, the toes all bone.

  He crossed the room and went out onto the patio. He looked back in spite of himself, and there she was, staring right at him, her head still swaying to the music. She raised her hand and waved, a one-stroke sort of wave ending with the arm extended like a goodbye salute. Later that night he woke up in a funk thinking this was a kiss-off kind of gesture, a get-out-of-my-face kind of signal, but in the morning trying it in front of the mirror there seemed to be more hope in it; it seemed more open to interpretation.

  “How’d you know I like cheese Danish?”

  “I didn’t. That’s all they had left. You looked hungry.”

  Pam was sitting by herself at one of the tables on the patio. Wearing sunglasses, a T-shirt, and cutoffs. “You’re Peter, right?” He nodded. “Pam,” she said, unmoving. He nodded again, saying “Hi” for no apparent reason.

  “Do you swim?” She was looking at the pool through her shaded eyes as if he owned it and she was puzzled that he wasn’t always in it.

  “No. Never learned. One of the gaps in my childhood. How about you?”

  “I dabble, if you know what I mean. If you threw me in right now I wouldn’t drown.” She huffed a contracted chuckle. “As long as you didn’t keep me in there too long.”

  She took a delicate bite of the Danish and he noticed her hands then, the ends of her fingers—childlike nubs, nails wider than they were long.

  The next day she came up to him and said she was going shopping; she needed a swimsuit; if she was going to spend time in a place with a pool, she needed to get right into it, she said, “indulge in it” was how she put it. “Come with me, do you mind? To be honest, I’m just sort of using you; the shuttle’s gone already, and I can’t drive.” So after the afternoon sessions they took one of the cars and headed into town. Use me, he thought. And it surprised him, that he felt comfortable thinking it.

  She checked out swimsuits, and at one point she made him try on a jacket. She was actually excited when he put it on. Proud of the way he looked in it, as if they were old friends, or old lovers; she touched him for the first time: the collar of the jacket, smoothing it down. This touch through layers of
fabric more like a kiss, Peter thought.

  They talked about Calliope, and joked about the same suit Eli Thornquist wore every day, whether he had ten of them lined up in his closet.

  She never did find a swimsuit she liked, but he did buy the jacket. They discovered a Thai restaurant down by the waterfront that looked busy, which was always a good sign, Pam said—he didn’t pick up on anything about the condition of the kitchen and he put it down to the barriers they had unconsciously set up around themselves. They were circling each other, keeping a safe distance.

  It was dark when they got back and Peter walked her to the other side of the complex, where her apartment was. The sprinkler system was creating a thigh-high rainstorm outside her door and the noise was like the noise they had been fighting all their lives it seemed to Peter then, the intrusive cackle of other people’s agendas. He wanted to say something but he didn’t—about how he had enjoyed himself. He wanted to touch her somehow, give her a hug, just grab her hand for a second, but he let that go too.

  She thanked him and lingered on the doorstep, her hair swinging in the way of the key, her bag slipping into the crook of her arm. He said “Good night” over the hiss of the sprinkler system and she smiled and thanked him again and that was that.

  The hole that opened up inside him somewhere as he walked away from her made his legs buckle for an instant. It scared him. I don’t need this. I do need this. The kind of hole that eats up common sense and turns grown men into little boys again.

  16

  Mercury climbing, Icarus falling . . .

  Ron Koch was wearing his loafers, which was a mistake because his feet hurt. The tops of them were raw from the sun—even after the milk bath Anita had given them. Milk and then this ointment she had brought with her from Pittsburgh. Aloe vera.