A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  Barefoot would have been better but he couldn’t bring himself to go anywhere barefoot. Not even in his own apartment would he go barefoot.

  He opened the door to the lab and turned on the light. He felt like a burglar all of a sudden, being there after hours with no one else around. Breaking into what, though? If it was such a big deal they would keep the place locked up.

  He turned on the lamp next, the one they used with the ganzfeld goggles, and swung it over the recliner. He climbed into the chair thinking there would be nothing to it—this was going to be like flying solo, that’s all. He kicked off his shoes; where they had cut into the inflamed skin he now felt fire. Itchy fire.

  Ron remembered the first time he’d actually ridden a horse in a race, a pony, at a county fair when he was about eleven and still believed he could end up being a real jockey. It was like that, in a way—only there was no one around to witness it this time, which was good in this situation. A remote viewing session without a technician beside you to help you through the rough spots was verboten, supposedly. Jane and that heavyweight Blenheim would have a fit if they ever got wind of it.

  He thought of Anita then, the smile on her face when he’d climbed into bed with her that first time, the way her arms went around him—like something a little child would do: unconsciously—and it washed all that away, his second thoughts about what he was doing. Breaking the rules. This would be for her as well as for him. He was going to change their lives.

  He twisted around and punched the play button on the tape machine, then leaned back; he took three deep breaths and tried to put the bruised sting of his feet out of his mind. He started the slow climb down, telling himself to relax even before the voice on the tape did. Down into alpha, then beta. Focus on the coordinates—he’d looked them up, the exact date so there’d be no foul-ups—May 19, 1973, around two in the morning. His Toronto apartment over a tailor’s shop on Ossington Avenue, the night before the Preakness, the night of his dream: the one about the longshot. This time he was going to make sure the name stuck—he was going to help his hunch along with a little bit of theater.

  In the wash of white noise and pink light Ron found the focus—the tiny pinprick of intrusion that pulled him out of himself but at the same time through to his very center. Like threading a needle, Jane had said.

  And into the ether. It was like a ride on Secretariat through a driving wind, that’s how he described it to Anita that first time, not that he had ever had the pleasure of riding a horse like Secretariat—like tumbling head over burning feet through a hurricane. The coordinates; focus on the coordinates.

  . . . into a room he’d forgotten was so small, the smell of himself, younger, careless with what he ate back then—lots of salt, spicy fried foods—before he had to look out for the cholesterol. The oscillating fan by the window blowing the early-summer heat further into the room. This place he lived in then seemed so dismal, the flip side of nostalgia. Furniture he’d forgotten he once owned, photographs on the fridge of people he didn’t recognize. He could see it all—the glow of matter itself. Blenheim had told them over coffee one morning, how things would look different “on the other side.” Shit, “the other side”; he’d always thought that’s what the New Age Ouija board crowd called Death. The Afterlife. The Other Side.

  Back into the bedroom. He felt smeared on the walls of the place for an instant, unraveled. There in the bed snoring, himself as he was then, this chunk of meat taking up space, head under the covers—the poor slob didn’t know how lucky he was to be alive in 1973: a good car for four thousand bucks, no AIDS.

  He was standing by the bed now, feeling his sore feet on the rough rug—the pain with him even here. Remote pain but pain just the same. He took a step toward the window and the fan turned on him. He could feel the breeze: warm and scented with city weeds, and roof tar; like the cold bite of winter wind he remembered from his out-of-body journey to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Do your dance, do your dance . . . It was time to wake himself up.

  “Paper Mile, remember that. Paper Mile! Wake up, Ronnie, baby, come on. Paper Mile!” His voice like drums in his ears, echoing, repeated down a folded, knotted tunnel, back through his own memory—the lump in the bed was still lying there, stillness personified—dead to the world. “Come on, Ronnie. Wake up and smell the roses; this could be it! The big score. Clean out your bank accounts, sell your Pinto! Tomorrow is your LUCKY DAY!”

  Nothing. He reached out to the lump of himself under the covers; he wanted to slap himself awake; with this hand that was really a virtual hand, Jane had told him. His real hand was back in the lab.

  He was touching the blanket before he could stop himself. His hand passed through the blanket, then the hair, the bone: he felt a shuddering jolt as if he were landing on top of his own chest. And a sucking searing pain worse than any sunburn ran up his arm and into his lungs.

  Ron was falling but he was still on his feet. He felt a wedge of infinitely thin mirror guillotining him, down through the top of his head, between the eyes, the lobes of his cortex, the bridge of his nose—a precise division of himself, meticulously fair-minded. Me here; me there. It felt like the twoness in the rhythm of the oscillating fan—this way, that; this way, that—two places, two times, at once: the impossibility of it falling down on him. Slicing.

  The face of the guy in bed turned now, into the light of the urban glare washing from the window along with the tepid, preowned air. His own face, the old one he used to have: young, soft, unknowing; with a trackless forehead and lips that shaped an unsolved puzzlement.

  Ron’s young eyes opened with the tick of a minute turning. The little postage stamp number on the side table clock flipped: a “3” fell on a “2.” The memory of this instant echoed up through time and back again. The eyes opened on nothing—they reminded the older Ron of a kitten he once had; that first day its eyes had been like opaque marble puris.

  And then the grimace, and the sound of young Ron’s throat gagging, in an ungentle clutching at breath. While the ethereal Ron felt the tugging back (this way, that, oscillating faster, faster—his hand caught in the clutches of his own immature head) and forth, the future injecting the present, here; the present here, informing the present there—in the future. The unruly impracticality of it succumbing to a universe that will not abide a breach in the hull of what is, was, and ever shall be. The tugging, twisting . . . Ron Koch now neither here nor there. Somewhere in between.

  The young Ron Koch waking with these words in his head: “Paper Mile, Paper Mile” beating in his ears with the pulse of the pain: a weight like a horse in high heels standing on his head. Ron Koch with the sour taste of slovenly Chinese food in his mouth, feeling the words for his outrage drain away into a hole that opened up inside of everything.

  The older Ron Koch slid back into the ethereal wind, spiraling widdershins round the track. No Secretariat this time; just the tumbling ubiquity of dissolution.

  There are two versions of this—oscillating like an Escher graphic; it is a paradox after all. That a man could visit himself like an injection of visionary vaccine into the muscle of his own past with knowledge, information—in defiance of entropy’s ironclad formula—is impossible. One version demands that he fail in his attempt, that the course of events remain unchanged—and Ron Koch on the reclining chair in his favorite remote viewing lab struggles to return to his own past but falls asleep instead.

  And of course the other version also demands that he fail in the attempt. That’s the paradox of it.

  His feet are burning, and he reaches for this pinprick of light, of hope—if my feet hurt I must be alive. No one ever died of sore feet.

  17

  I guess they can take that away from me . . .

  “Ron’s gone.” Anita woke up crying in the night saying this. And thinking, This is like forgetting a mantra. The light through the blinds was a predawn husk of itself. She had been dreaming about a man she desperately loved; a semblance of a man she had
once known, or would know someday, but he was nameless, faceless; the feel of his skin the only thing that would distinguish him. The sound of his voice.

  Ron’s gone.

  The part of her she devoted to a circular whispered melody, an enchanted rondeau she transmitted to the world—all about her new lover, Ron Koch—at some point during the night it had been shut down. She had shut it down, out of necessity or a sense of guilt. This new allegiance to the dreamt-up incubus had driven him out of her mind.

  Ron’s gone. As the room brightened with the solid verbs and nouns of the waking world, none of it made any sense. The skein of prayer she wrapped him in seemed worthless now, unraveled.

  In her work back home, touching a toy or a piece of jewelry opened up a torrent of rushing squeals and smells and flashing colors—so she rolled over and buried her face in the other pillow. Nothing: a blackboard wiped clean, faint smudges of words fading as she tried to decipher them. Gone, but not gone. Like a stroke victim she had no utterance for it—this hole in her scheme of things that shouted at her without words.

  Later when people were up and about she confronted them. “Ron. Where’s Ron Koch? He—he’s not in his room.” She had checked: two flights up from hers, at the end of the hall—a corner unit; he’d liked it because it had views in two directions. The door was half open; a maid was in there making up the bed, and a man in the bathroom was laying in new tiles around the shower stall. He said he’d been at it for three days.

  The concierge, the man who ordered taxis and arranged dinner reservations—she liked him; he always had a smile for her. But this time he was deferential—professionally deferential—and frowning at her, pointing with his stubby finger at a list he kept taped to the counter next to his telephone. No “Ron Koch.” No one on staff had ever heard of him.

  Back in her room she tried to smoke a cigarette. She knew she wasn’t crazy. Maybe it was one of Calliope’s elaborate experiments; they were testing her resolve, her instincts. She wandered about the apartment, circled the coffee table. She felt caged in the absurdity of it. On the bathroom vanity she found her brand-new jar of aloe vera skin cream (she really had to work at opening it, till it popped like a dropped tennis ball), the untouched swirl under the lid—virgin. There was no scent of him in her bed, she could barely remember his face—just the dream of the counterfeit, the incubus that had garbled her mantra and driven him away.

  “I want all the others interviewed. Separately. Then a group meeting in the common room,” Blenheim said. Anita was sitting with a cup of ginseng tea Jane had given her. “Tell me again please, Anita.” He had one of his yellow pads in front of him.

  “His name is Ronald Koch.” Her voice rose into the register of impending sobs and she damped it down with a swallow of tea. “About fifty, fifty-five, heavyset, oh, five six, five seven. Jesus, you must have all this—you hired him, for God’s sake! He came in about three weeks ago, a couple of days after I got here. From Canada. Toronto, I think it was—no, Hamilton. He lives in Hamilton now.”

  “He was never here, Anita. We’ve never even heard of the man,” Blenheim said as Jane turned away to use the phone.

  Gordon Quarendon was the first one to be interviewed: “Ron? Sure. What about Ron?” There was no doubt in his mind. A fellow recruit in his mid-fifties, short, nervous type. Into horses in a big way—a professional handicapper from Canada. “His numbers are kind of iffy,” he said, looking at Jane as if he were passing on privileged information.

  “What do you mean, ‘iffy’?” Blenheim said. They were in his office but he was peering into a drawer as if he’d never opened it before.

  “Born June eighteenth, forty-five. Comes out to a six, which is, you know, balance, harmony, which is fine in itself but it doesn’t jibe with his name, ‘Ronald Koch,’ which works out to be a two: duality, ambiguity.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Numerology. I live by it, man. I—”

  “How do you know his birth date?”

  “I asked him.”

  Jane put her hand over the mouthpiece. “He’s right. Just got word from Sandra. She’s tracked down a Ronald Koch, born in Toronto, June eighteenth, 1945.”

  “There you go,” Quarendon said, swinging his chair round so he could stretch out.

  “Died May nineteenth, 1973,” Jane said.

  “Nineteen seventy-three? That’s crazy. I spoke to him yesterday.”

  “The records show he died in his sleep—an aneurysm behind the left eye. He was overweight, smoked three packs a day, supposedly. ‘Natural causes’ on the death certificate.”

  When it was his turn, Peter came into Blenheim’s office thinking it was all about his session with the crashed 747. Blenheim was sitting on the edge of his desk, and before Peter sat down he handed him a small scratch pad and told him to make a list of the other recruits in the order he had met them.

  After a minute or two of scribbling and crossing out and repositioning names, he handed it back to Blenheim. “What’s this all about?”

  Blenheim took a deep breath. “Just tell me about—” He glanced at Peter’s list. “Ronald Koch.”

  This was later, in the common room: the couches and chairs seemed askew in the way that a body’s posture is undone by sudden death.

  “I have a vague impression of someone else, another recruit like yourselves—not a specific one, more like—as if there’s a gap here, in this room full of people.” Eli Thornquist was pacing. No one said anything; no one else moved. Anita was smoking in here but no one said anything about it—allowing her this transgression. She seemed calmer now, almost at ease in the midst of them all—an acknowledged loss, easier to deal with, Peter figured.

  Eli turned back toward them. “But that could be attributed to the fact that you are all attuned to this missing person; you’re all thinking about him, and I’m picking up on it. The essence of Ronald Koch if not the substance.”

  Jane spoke up then; she’d been going over notes she’d pulled from her briefcase. “We think this Ronald Koch tried something he wasn’t supposed to. He did something risky and ended up doing himself in.”

  “What do you mean, ‘risky’?” Simon Hayward asked from the back of the room; the rest of them turned to look—at the kid that hardly spoke to anyone, except to contradict them. Even Quarendon found it hard to make conversation with the guy. Even Pamela thought he was a jerk, and she got along with everyone.

  Peter put it down to his youth; he could forgive him his youthful arrogance (the way he broke into other people’s conversations, as much as saying, “I know that; in fact I know more about it than you”), but there comes a time when an asshole must eventually be seen for what he is—an asshole, pure and simple. He wasn’t a kid anymore.

  “From what we’ve pieced together, it seems that Ronald Koch interfered with his own life line,” Blenheim said.

  “Just before he disappeared Anita says he was spending a lot of time thinking about a period in his life—” It was Jane speaking again; she moved over to where Anita was sitting and put a hand on her shoulder. “An incident he felt didn’t turn out the way he would have liked it to. You know: ‘If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t do that, I’d do this’—that kind of thing. He was reminiscing about a time when he could have made a lot of money betting on a longshot. Anita says he told her the exact date—the day of the running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico, the year a horse named”—she checked her notes—“Secretariat won. Nineteen seventy-three. It turns out he died in the early hours of that very morning.”

  “If he supposedly died back then, how do we know this guy—why do we remember him and not you?” Gordon said.

  “You people are all exceptionally gifted sensitives—that could have something to do with it. Or maybe the fact you’ve all traveled through the ether, accessed information no one else is privy to.”

  “Or you’re picking it up from Anita, who was especially close to him,” Jane said.

  Eli was faci
ng them now, leaning against the big TV set. “Somehow he went beyond mere observation. From what Anita tells us, he was capable of it—from a session that supposedly took place a few days ago. To the Rose Bowl Parade or—” Anita said something and Eli corrected himself. “Thank you. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—okay, well. It sounds like he was on the verge of a full-blown corporeal manifestation. So he was capable of it, and probably not in control of it. Anyway, if he materialized even on a modest level—visual, auditory, it doesn’t matter—if there was a transfer of information, with himself, he was in jeopardy of what we call ‘implosion.’”

  “There must have been a point where he was in two places at once—two times,” Blenheim said. “Oscillating between them, expanding the probabilities of his life line into an extremely unstable dual-reality state. In that situation, something’s got to give. Something has to collapse.” He got up from his perch on the edge of the table. “Even if he’d shown up a thousand miles away he could have set up the same dynamic—not as catastrophic; more like a slow burn, but just as destructive.

  “The classic time travel paradox sets up a negative-feedback loop. In most cases, the subject would have failed—and survived—and the outcome would fall in the other direction: no transfer of information to his younger self, and the universe unfolds as it should. But obviously this Ron Koch interfered in a way that was extreme enough for the dynamics of the healing process to step in and eliminate the irritant, at the point of transgression. Like all natural systems it’s very economical; it takes the path of least resistance—it will only terminate the time traveler’s life at the latest possible point on his or her life line—”

  Thornquist broke in here: “This being Ron Koch on the night in question, when was it? Nineteen seventy-three? The young Ron Koch must have learned something that changed the future of the older Ron—which in turn would affect a whole lot of other life lines. And the obverse is true too, of course—the elimination of him at this point would affect the lives of all the people he subsequently came in contact with; but again, the path of least resistance—”