A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “He could have touched himself.” Pamela was curled up in one of the bucket chairs at the back of the room near the French doors, away from Simon, away from everyone. “I’m just thinking out loud. If he touched himself, maybe tried to wake himself up, that would do it, wouldn’t it? He wouldn’t have to say anything. Just create this memory that echoed back and forth through time.” They seemed to take note of what she was saying and Larry coughed. He’d decided that since Anita was smoking, he could have a cigarette too.

  “The bottom line seems to be,” Jane said, “you mess with history, the universe will swallow you up. If there are any rules to this game, this is the cardinal one—stay away from your own life line, and not just your birth date either; you would have to go back nine months before that, before you were conceived.”

  Jane Franklin seemed on the verge of scolding them all, like a schoolteacher would. But they were adults, and with Anita in the state she was, it seemed to Peter she was deciding on a bit of friendly if not professional advice instead: “I just urge you all to refrain from any unauthorized sessions. No flying solo. You people are on the cutting edge of this technology, and I want you to think about where that expression came from—‘cutting edge.’ You’ve got to treat it with respect. We’re playing with sharp knives here, very sharp knives.”

  And just like a schoolteacher, as if Peter had seen it coming, she dug into her briefcase and came up with homework. She placed a stack of documents on the table beside the coffee machine. “I want you to take some time to look at these guidelines we’ve drawn up. But I stress, once again, please, no unauthorized sessions. No unassisted remote viewing, no unsupervised out-of-body stuff, all right? Not even any deep relaxation exercises. That’s it for now.” She looked at Eli and Mike Blenheim—neither had anything more to say. “We’ll see you all tomorrow morning then. Thank you.”

  Simon Hayward was up to the front of the class before she finished speaking. He skirted the congestion around Anita and headed right for the stack of guidelines. He passed Pam on the way out and did a little mock sword fight around her head with his rolled up pages. She slowly pushed one half of her hair behind her ear and just looked at him till he left the room.

  18

  Nightmare on Elm Street: The Prequel . . .

  “There are thousands of people out there who are obsessed with this sort of thing, as you know. The Lone Gunman Theory, the Conspiracy, both sides—they can’t let it go. And this client in particular—well, he has the money to keep us on retainer. He wants us to sort of check in on the event every now and then, with different approaches of course, different operatives—so now it’s your turn, Peter.” Eli Thornquist looked odd at this angle, peering at him from above and behind the recliner, moving as he spoke, his lower teeth crooked and stained. Peter hadn’t noticed that before.

  “He just wants to know what really happened—no ax to grind. He says he has no ax to grind. No agenda. Dallas, Dealey Plaza, around noon on November twenty-second, 1963—just your impressions.” Eli smiled and patted Peter on the thigh, rougher than he had to, overcompensating, Peter figured. “Back before you were born, I guess.”

  “Not quite. I must have been about eight or nine months old by then.”

  “A baby. You will never know what that day meant to so many people.” He looked off into the corner for a moment. “Or maybe you will.”

  Deep steady breathing taking him down into the hypnagogic; he was learning to fly with his toes trailing through the surface of sleep. In his head, soprano and distant, Jane Franklin’s lulling words: . . . let me tell you where we are going today. The ganzfeld goggles seemed heavy. The filtered light seemed blood pink—flashlight-through-baby-fingers pink—against a white horizonless sea. Figure/ground. Me against everything else.

  Peter was immersed and lost for a while, then dragged back up above the surface—by the thing in his hand they had given him to use like the pen from the session to Chicago, like the tray fragment from the downed 747. His “psychometric link.”

  It was a book this time, an old math book, fifties vintage—something for kids in grade school.

  Where are we going today? We are taking you to Texas . . .

  Down again, falling backwards, letting the book lead him out of himself.

  We are targeting a point in the past, Peter. The time coordinate is right about when you were born. He heard this in his head as if Eli Thornquist’s mouth were next to his ear. But the voice was really his mind sorting through the scant data that wafted his way. It was a mirage of a conversation: the information was going directly to his short-term memory; the voice merely a virtual voice.

  Jane’s voice now telling him, You are heading for the Lone Star State, Peter. Dallas. Book the flight, book the flight and fall in love, fall. Into Love. (Singing now): “Do you ken John K. with his head so low . . . Do ken John, do you ken John Ken John Ken . . .”

  He is on the floor, his remote eyes at knee level, where the book is, was. Grime, cardboard dust. Grit against his virtual cheek. The sour sweet rotting potato smell of decaying flesh—a mouse or a bird carcass somewhere nearby. Hidden in a corner, he could see it for an instant—feathers shrouding bones. Definitely a bird—alive with decomposition.

  The book in his hands is married to a book in the box, identical but time-vectored apart; in a cardboard carton of twenty-four piled on a skid: six layers of five, stacked like interlocking bricks. There it is—in the left carton of the first tier.

  But at the same time, back in Calliope’s lab, clutched to Peter’s chest. The one in his hands aged by countless tiny fingers flipping pages—the typography is eye-eroded. The pages are child-weary—with tears, spit, pressed noses, flecks of dry ketchup black as old blood, earwax. It is graffitied with heart-caged declarations of love, epithets scrawled with naive élan, lewd and grotesque amendments to illustrations of Happy American Children doing Math-competent American Things.

  Here in the Texas School Book Depository the copy is pristine, virgin—owned only by the children in the pictures—redolent of new bookness.

  Peter can see a high-beamed ceiling above the tiers of cartons; a wooden two-wheeler in the corner by the window; a table by the door with a hot plate, a coffeepot—the tabletop is sugared and creamed, stenciled with rings, coffee cup rings (arrayed in a fleeting allusion to the logo of the Olympic Games). If he were there in the flesh he would be filling his lungs with an amalgamated scent of baked dust, sweet new paper, printer’s ink, old coffee.

  And cigarette smoke.

  A man is standing by the window; the edge of sunlight cuts across the wood floor, across the toes of his shoes. He is looking out on Dealey Plaza as if he were about to find something in the view—a message, a meaning.

  The faint hiss of his final drag. The gentle timpani of his black shoes on the rough wood floor. Army issue: shoes made to be worn out. He is perspiring as he opens the window—a sash window that sticks for a second before fitfully giving in, and grinding its way open. Peter can smell the man’s sweat; he can see his white rayon shirt yellowed at the armpits.

  The man drops his cigarette butt and goes back behind a row of cartons. Brown paper in his hands now, a package as long as a golf club, something wrapped like a gift. Brown paper and string. He is pulling at the end of it, tearing at the paper with a Christmas-morning absorption—metal. Gun-gray. The point of the gun is blunt. To the point.

  Words in Peter’s head: 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, Mannlicher-Carcanomannlicher-Carcanomannlichercarcano . . . like a voodoo chant tearing him away . . .

  Down, through the floor, six floors . . . down

  Peter is outside in the bright noon sunlight. Crowds of people line the street, women wearing hats, as if on the way to church, men wearing ties over white short-sleeved shirts, fedoras. Cigars. Sunglasses. The sound of motorcycles moves closer; he picks up the scent of grass clippings among sparse t
rees, a picket fence in shade above and behind the gathering onlookers. The picket fence abuts an overpass. Over more shade—a boundary of darkness.

  Someone is there with Peter, from his side of things, from his side of history, from Peter’s own world—Peter knows this without seeing him; it is a man: a young, angry man. His face is pixilated, blurred out of recognition. His presence is like the intrusion of phony flavor in good coffee.

  Where are we going today? Peter hears this new voice close to his ear. (It is a cross-dressed parody of Jane’s voice.) It is coming from the flip side, the back lot of what he is remotely viewing here in Dallas. But at the same time, this other person is saying these words, vocalizing them from the scene below. He is solid, substantial, part of it all. There. In the flesh. Oscillating between the two—there and not there. The male figure pulsates and flickers as it fades in and out of the ether; rising and turning like an evolving smoke ring. He smiles and winks at Peter, pirouettes and somersaults in a slow free-fall dance. There is the glint of something moving with him, something inanimate, but Peter only sees it as a degraded mosaic of light and dark. (It is, in fact, a gold chain and the likeness of a saint free-falling with the intruder—blessing his journey.)

  To the people on Elm Street all this state vector flip-flop is time-dilated into one smudged flash—much like a puff of smoke.

  The figure is stable now—sitting cross-legged on the verge of grass, on the grassy knoll, looking in the direction of the approaching parade of vehicles; motorcycles; fancy old limos blue-black and fin-blunted with importance, stars and stripes on tiny flags, the presidential standard—their headlights are puny sparks against the blaring sunlight. Moving slow as a funeral.

  Where are we going today? His mocking voice is in Peter’s head; at the same time it solidifies into real speech, as real as the roar of engines and the trickling pitter-patter of outdoor clapping. He is lying on the grass now, in the camouflage of fluttering tree shade, looking down on the scene below, his head just over the crest of the knoll. In the flesh, part of the scene; but his voice is still in Peter’s head: Fancy meeting you here! Peter Abbott: COME ON DOWN!

  For Peter, there is a pull like a net of fingers dragging him down out of the ether all of a sudden, a collapse into elsewhere—a condensation of himself, a state change: gas to solid, reverse sublimation, from the sublime to the . . . a wrenching struggle, two places at once, two times . . . No, I cannot be here. I am here already, in the flesh, a small baby somewhere in Cleveland. I could do myself in—like Ron Koch.

  The open limo passes by like a compressed précis dream of the Zapruder film. JFK and Jackie doing the scene as if it were a cheap knockoff of the real thing—too clean and crisp. It lacks the grittiness of peripheral documentation, the cool side-glance mystery and the sexy noise of 8mm footage. Oliver Stone would never do it like this—the soundtrack is empty, metronomeless, unpaced. The gunshots are like distant, cartoon, champagne-cork poppings; people just stand there staring from the side of the road, extras not doing their job. Some of them pull focus: a kid fights with his little sister.

  Simon lies in the shadows of the fence and the trees pointing at the street, at the passing Lincoln convertible in a playful mime of shooting: he is one-eyed squinting down the length of his arm, his index finger. His index finger is as blunt as the point of a gun. His thumb is cocked; his mouth is mouthing a gunshot—a backwards kiss. Just as the last shot comes down out of the sky.

  He looks up at Peter’s revolving, flickering presence and smiles. He is trying his best to look like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver—that scene where he pretends to blow his brains out.

  19

  . . . the doppelgänger tango

  It was as if Peter were looking at it all through a mirror. The image of someone with him all the time, dogging his every move. Like the theory his acting coach used to harp on—about the two streams that ran through a stage performance, the life stream of the actor in confluence with the life stream of the character being portrayed—was that it?

  “I keep seeing someone—with me. Like that last time in Dallas.”

  “That’s impossible. You’re imagining it.” Mike Blenheim was wearing a suit today, a dark blue double-breasted; he sat down on the edge of the desk and undid the jacket and then the shirt collar, loosening the tie and ducking out of it with a look on his face that suggested he was backing out of a guillotine.

  “Well, whatever—he’s there every time. The same guy.”

  Peter had just come out of an RV ganzfeld trance that had taken him to a desolate hillside, a bleak, barren place full of wind and driving sleet. Bare rock and scrubby evergreens clinging to craggy cliffs. He was supposed to have found some sort of military installation, something to do with chemical weapons. “He was sitting on a rock about twenty yards away from me. He actually waved at me.”

  “Could be like phantom limb pain—you know what I’m talking about? What amputees feel; the missing leg, arm, throbbing, itching—that sort of thing. Your left-behind body’s there in front of you, your brain adding it to the landscape—”

  “It’s not me. I know that much. But it’s hard to make out details—more or less a blur.” Peter swung the light away and climbed out of the recliner.

  “Just make a note of it on your session report. If it keeps up, we’ll get Jane or someone to go along with you next time—see if she picks something up—”

  “I get the feeling he wants something.”

  “Maybe you want something from him.”

  “I do. I want him to get the hell out of my sessions.” Peter took a drink from the glass of water that was waiting for him on the small table next to the recliner. His hand was shaking and he put the glass back down before Blenheim noticed.

  “The ether’s a strange place; you’re one of the lucky ones. Some of the guys doing this stuff back in the early days—some of them never came out of it; ended up psychotic—no safeguards back then. Like test pilots without parachutes.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Yeah, yeah, it is.”

  “Well, thanks; but it doesn’t.”

  “Do you play tennis?”

  “No. Why? A bit, I guess. You know, bashing the ball around.”

  “Get out of here and get some fresh air. Find someone to play with—a real person, to dog your every move. Next session pretend you’re doing the same thing, trying to deek the guy out, physically. Make the process a muscular thing, a body reflex, rather than a cerebral one—you get my drift?”

  “Tennis.” Peter wondered what it would be like playing tennis with a ghost in the ether—Casper the Unfriendly Ghost with an invisible racket and an attitude.

  “Yeah, why not?” Mike Blenheim blinked a few times—those translucent eyelashes of his made his eyes look teary. “Get Pamela out there too, couldn’t do her any harm.” His tongue came around to do a sweep of his front teeth; a defensive body move, Peter thought. Everyone taking it for granted he and Pam were an item already.

  “I keep thinking I’m off-target when this guy shows up, like today—deflected. You know what I mean?” He wanted to steer the conversation away from Pam for some reason. “It’s as if I know this person real well, but I can’t quite grab on to who it is—”

  “It’s you; believe me. ‘Phantom limb pain,’ remember?” he said, quoting himself. “Okay? Got it?” Putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder now, guiding him toward the door. He still had the necktie in his hand; as he walked by the filing cabinet he placed it next to a potted cactus, gently so the knot wouldn’t be disturbed. Peter wondered whether he’d bought it that way—pre-tied.

  20

  Beaucoup de cool chicks

  The shuttle was taking some of the Calliope staff to L’Espérance Airport today, then heading back down to Marigot—the French side of the island, which suited Simon just fine after all the Shell stations and the COKE signs on the Dutch side, the people with time-share come-ons at every street corner, every speed b
ump. The French side seemed more civilized somehow, the road signs all standardized, understated—more “up-market,” as this Brit he used to tend bar with back in Vancouver used to say. About North Vancouver of all places, the suburb on the other side of the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Simon had thought of it more as the geriatric part of town—all the retired people clogging the mall parking lots with their massive Buicks and Mercs. Anyway, Marigot was more to his liking, with its streets full of jewelry shops and little boutiques with one plain dress in the window, which was a signal for, This place is fucking expensive. Shops selling huge bottles of perfume: Chanel number whatever in the two-gallon economy size.

  He loved it, wondered when his first month’s pay would come through so he could actually use his MasterCard again. Real money was what he really needed, though. Folding money. Old money. Pre-plastic money: or gold. Gold would do just fine.

  That morning they’d had him in a remote viewing session targeting a piece of paper, of all things. A list of some German art dealer’s assets—a piece of paper in a file folder locked away in a safety-deposit box in the basement of a bank in Zurich. Something to do with Holocaust victims, provenances. All those works of art stolen by the Nazis.

  Since his first session with the tin box in the attic he had led them to believe he was making progress. He’d fed them a sufficient number of successes to keep him on the payroll and get the luscious Jane Franklin to actually touch his hand after the last session. She was that grateful, pleased really, genuinely pleased, which for a second made him feel a little bit guilty; but hell, he knew he was on the right track—paying out the line an inch or two at a time. If they thought he was falling behind, they’d give him more training, teach him more tricks. He’d learned this dynamic when he was a kid trying to get to the Olympics; the squeaky wheel getting the oil. That old French expression his coach used all the time: Reculer pour mieux sauter. He’d say this so much, Simon actually knew the words off by heart. The only French he did know. It meant “Pull yourself back so you can jump ahead of the pack”—something like that. His coach had been talking about diving, of course, but it applied here just as well.