A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  Simon looked down at his own hand resting on the newspaper, on a graph of thin jagged lines: the flux of things economic; for some reason he didn’t want to believe Gordon could do it. Something he couldn’t do, that was it. Something he desperately needed to know how to do if he was going to get what he wanted. “What if I lie? What if I make something up?” He smiled and tried to laugh, hoping Gordon would see it for what it was: a stupid thing to say.

  Gordon put his little fishing rod down, sat up straight, and pushed hair out of his face. His eyes narrowed as if he really had seen something, rather than heard it. “What’s the point of that? Shit, man. I’m not going to waste my time here—”

  “Okay, okay—my mother.”

  “Your mother. What’s her name?”

  “What do you need her name for? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It helps, okay? Everything helps.”

  “Joyce. Joyce Hayward.”

  Gordon took some deep breaths and started again—“When it starts to rotate, you know, clockwise, I’m on the money, or very close. Okay?”—scanning the map from left to right with the dangling key. He got over as far as the Great Lakes and it started to swing. Gordon slowed down and when the key reached Lake Michigan it began to rotate. His shoulders were hunched and his eyes seemed to be rolled back into his head.

  Simon sat there with his legs crossed, his hands still resting on his folded newspaper, and waited. He heard the rev of a two-stroke engine in the distance. A small lizard did stop-action antics in the tendrils of a tree root, then vanished. One of the gardeners walked by with a coil of hose over his shoulder.

  “Chicago. She’s somewhere near Chicago. I need a more detailed map to pin it down exactly, but—”

  “Wheaton,” Simon said.

  “What?”

  “She lives in Wheaton. It’s a suburb of Chicago. Right on the money. Thank you, Gord.” He could be as polite as anyone when he gave it a thought.

  “My pleasure.” Gordon put down his device and leaned back, working his shoulders, stretching with his hands clasped over his head. “You want to give it a shot now?”

  Simon tried it once with Gordon’s old key and when he started to feel something, something profoundly visceral, as if he were feeling the target and the movement of the key plotting a path across his stomach lining—jerking around in his gut like the needle on a lie detector—he stopped it in its tracks and feigned fatigue, beginner’s frustration. That was enough; he would go it alone from here.

  He sat with Gordon for ten more minutes or so pretending to be interested in his ancestors, his vegetable garden, the number of molars he had left (Simon declared that he had a full set and had to prove it to Gordon by letting him look in his mouth), his wife’s disease, the number of letters in the name of the town he was born in. The fact that he was conceived on his parents’ wedding night, February 4, 1956 (“just outside Memphis”), and born exactly 272 days later, which according to numerology is reduced down only as far as eleven, a Master Number. “And my actual birth date, November second, 1956, reduces down to a seven, which is, you know—represents the mystical world, psychic powers.”

  Some of the stuff Simon actually found interesting: “You know, our Native American brothers in the Southwest won’t go near anything associated with the number sixty-six?” He paused as if Simon were going to refute this claim, his pointed chin nodding once with his eyebrows up as high as they would go. “And that’s because when you write it down most people do it with these two little counterclockwise spirals. Bad news, man. Evil. Anything counterclockwise. Everywhere you go, man; it must be some kind of universal taboo.”

  When Gordon finally wandered off for something to eat, it came to Simon that his little conversation had been like his grandmother’s habit of dipping her chocolate chip cookies in her tea; she did it just long enough for them to sag under their own tea-logged weight, but just before the sugary, lard-and-flour-reinforced structure broke down and part of the cookie tumbled into the teacup (he never once saw that happen) she had this knack of recovering with a swift little scoop of her bony hand.

  Their conversation had been like that: the slow accumulation of data building to a saturation point of what he wanted from Gordon but never at any time breaking down into the components of an interrogation. But it was easy with Gordon—like dunking Girl Scout cookies.

  26

  . . . the most important meal of the day

  “Larry’s piggybacking,” Susan said.

  “What?” Blenheim was in his bathrobe, his eyes blurred with sleep, his light hair frothing around his ears like angora. A vague memory of her getting out of bed, shower sounds—hours ago.

  “Larry’s piggybacking; when he goes through sometimes he gets distracted by other sessions. He ends up sending us footage of all kinds of extraneous material. This morning we got a flash of one of Simon’s—somewhere in the Ural Mountains—lost plutonium. All these images of rusty oil drums, broken down machinery.”

  “How d’you know it’s one of Simon’s? Maybe he’s just picking up random—”

  “When he’s into it, Simon’s signature comes up on the scope. His alpha pattern’s pretty distinctive—”

  “Shit.” Mike Blenheim let Susan squeeze past him into his small kitchen. She was going to make him an omelet, a Mexican omelet—“zingy” she called it. A wake-up omelet. “Is he drinking again?”

  “He says he’s not, but you know Larry—anyway, I don’t know what you’re worried about. I mean, if we can control it, it could be quite a breakthrough.” She put a bag down on the counter and opened his fridge, leaning over, the light giving her tan a theatrical, rosy glow—her nostrils flared as she inspected his vegetable keeper. “Does your wife let you get away with this?” A hand up to her hair. Behind one ear; head tilting—now the other.

  “Maybe we should give him some time off, get him into detox,” Blenheim said, pouring old coffee into a mug, putting it in the microwave. He scratched the back of his neck and yawned. Breakthroughs could wait till later. Susan like a piece of candy, standing there in her tan shorts, little feet in pristine tennis shoes, a plain white top with a wide scalloped neckline, the early angled light from the patio door plotting the line of her neck onto her collarbone—it was lust on the edge of gluttony. The omelet tied to the domesticity of the situation in another way now. His horniness from a lack of sleep, shift work—the difference in time zones setting crazy hours for sessions sometimes—real-time sessions for the Army Intelligence guys.

  He couldn’t think of sex without joining it to the mouth anymore—the image of the homunculus in introductory psychology textbooks, the cartoon depiction of sensory input, distorted into a big head and lips, a tiny torso, huge hands—where the brain wants us to be. The genitals. As a kid it had never seemed big enough: his penis. And what it was up to, what it was capable of, what it needed, had always occupied vast regions of his mental terrain. Now he saw the lips and tongue set in their rightful place, out front where they belonged—in the spotlight. A woman’s lips and tongue: the feminine version: homuncula.

  He came up behind her—she was taking green onions, a jar of salsa out of the bag—and put his arms around her, the noise of the microwave giving him permission, somehow, how it smothered the sound of her breathing, his chin coming to rest on the top of her head—the scent of shampoo. The feel of her against him—against the terry cloth against him. “Do you know what I really want for breakfast?” His words raised his head with each move of his jaw and his voice traveled through the bone of her cranium. “What I think you should have for breakfast?”

  Two hundred feet away in the dining area: a more formal sit-down arrangement than the lounge—if you let them know a day ahead they would actually serve you a pretty elaborate lunch if you wanted it. The patio doors closed this morning, by one of the staff just as Peter came in; the stiff breeze had done its work: paper napkins on the floor, part of a newspaper. He sat down with Anita and Gordon and tried to mak
e small talk. Pam had asked him to stay away till tonight—one of her “mood swings,” she called it—he couldn’t wipe away the picture in his mind of her standing there with the juice glass and the bottle of white rum—holding them tight. “Peter. You can not do that!” she had screamed at him, the night before. “Next time, you stay out of my head till I say so!”

  Ground rules no relationship had ever called for till now. The muscle of his psychic mind was too well developed, he realized. A lethal weapon, a responsibility—a fucking pain in the ass was what it was. He’d picked up on an image from her past—something about the predilections of an ex-boyfriend, and he’d used it without thinking to score a cheap point.

  He had spent the night full of doubt, of course. His own bed like the scratchy bottom of a cage—under his feet again, under his face. Down, down among familiar furnishings, obstacles that always channeled his noisy soul back to a rerun of his breakup with Jesse—the self-pitying absolutes of “It always happens to me” and “When will I ever—” and “Why?” and “Why not?” That sort of wallowing shit he’d thought he’d grown out of. The Abandoned Child thing.

  Loss, Loss, Loss instead of Gain, Gain, Gain. The half-full glass as opposed to the half-empty one—which made him think of Pam again, standing there in the doorway keeping him out, the glass she was holding like a hand grenade. He’d never seen her lip curl like that before, never wanted to again. On the phone this morning she had apologized, at least. For some of it. And he’d apologized too—for all of it.

  “Something about that one really gives me the creeps.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Anita nodded in the direction of the table over by the bar: Simon Hayward was eating a club sandwich and reading a newspaper. “When he walks by it’s like a cold draft or something. I get these images of strange, disembodied people—like stuff from my ghost-hunting days.” She took a sip of her coffee. Her cigarette package was under her other hand; just the tips of her fingers on it as if she were using a mouse. “Contrails. You know what I mean? I keep thinking of those smoke trails jet planes leave behind—like that for some reason.” They had all learned to let things like this out when they were together, these seemingly disjointed impressions; references that made no logical sense. “Black smoke. Burning tires.”

  “I see dirt,” Gord said. “Earth. Underground stuff—I don’t know.”

  “Earth, Wind and Fire,” Peter said under his breath, making the other two smile. “No water, though, not anymore. I shook his hand the first day he was here. Water. Lots of water. And electricity. Bolts of lightning. The guy’s a walking thunderstorm.”

  27

  . . . to the end of the rainbow and back again

  When someone says “I wish you’d never been born,” for some reason that’s not as threatening as saying “I wish you were dead” or “I could kill you.” The notion of somebody never having been born has a kind of benign grace to it—a neutrality, a cleanliness. As if it had to do with sprucing up the past, rather than mucking up the present. With something as tasteless as a corpse. Like abortion without the mess, the guilt. More like contraception really, Simon thought.

  I wish you’d never been born.

  He said it to himself in the middle of this monologue Gordon was hurling at him—a diatribe about honor, and responsibility—like he was Simon’s fucking father, for God’s sake. Unauthorized sessions, remote viewing, corporeal whatever—he was going on and on, and Simon just sat there, wanting to read his Wired magazine.

  “I know what you’re up to, man. Shit, you think I’m stupid? After me showing you how to do it with the rod and everything? Larry’s been telling me all about it, man. The sessions you showed up in; the ones you’re doing after hours. ‘Piggybacking,’ they call it.”

  “Are you going to tell me you’ve got my number?” Simon was still looking at his magazine.

  “Listen, smart-ass. You signed a contract when you got here just like everyone else. Your fucking around out there in the ether is putting the rest of us at risk. This stuff is like NASA sending someone to the moon—a very delicate operation. And you’re jeopardizing every one of us. Has that ever crossed your mind? I don’t give a shit about you—I go out of my way to, to be nice to you for some reason, showing you the trick with the map and—”

  “Fuck off; leave me alone.”

  Like that for another five minutes or so. Heat, lots of heat; sweat. No touching, though, no pushing and shoving; they both knew better.

  They were in the anteroom to one of the labs, early one morning even before any of the techies had arrived; Simon was surprised Gordon had been able to track him down. No one else was around so Simon just let him go on making all these accusations.

  Because he was right of course; he had been out there on his own, tinkering with things, fine-tuning: the Manson thing and what Larry must have picked up on recently.

  Simon had remotely viewed one of the labs—just for fun—showing up right in the middle of one of Peter Abbott’s sessions. He’d checked out the coordinates of the guy’s target right off the sheet of paper in Jane’s pretty little hand. He’d followed him down into the ether and ended up in a place that reminded him of fucking Siberia. And in the file folder on the desk in front of Jane he’d found a list of Peter’s previous targets.

  A few nights later, just for the hell of it, he’d checked those out too—one right after the other (the few he could keep in his head, at least). It was kind of like doing a marathon: exhausting, but what a trip to see Abbott fumbling around—it was like watching someone trying to thread a needle with boxing gloves on.

  And, oh yes: his little trip to New Mexico, “recovering” a treasure someone had originally dug up in 1961.

  It had taken Simon three attempts to get it right—this buried-treasure game was a lot more complicated than he’d thought it would be. At first he tried going back to just before the guy who found the stuff arrived on the scene. The account he’d read of the discovery had been quite detailed and Simon located the site in no time at all. The old guy had come up with three small leather sacks of gold nuggets the size of peas, the book said, in the crumbling wall of an adobe mission near Las Cruces.

  He found the sacks of gold at the base of the foundation under a mess of broken timbers and rubble where the back wall used to be—there waiting for him. Simon could see his hand pass through the clay and wood, the gold in the sacks feeling like the taste of buttered corn somehow, dense and rich, sweet. But when he tried shifting to “being-there” mode, his ersatz body pulled him down to a precarious perch on the rubble and he realized right away that it wasn’t going to work—not this way; he had nothing to dig with, for one thing; and he doubted he had the strength to hold the manifestation together long enough to dig the gold out and hide it somewhere else—where he could be certain it would remain undetected for another thirty-five years or so.

  Reading through Bill Ryan’s book again he noticed this time that at one point, after years of following leads and searching through Land Office records and Historical Society files, the guy had been ready to give up. He’d been heading home and stopped in a small-town drugstore to buy his baby sister a birthday card. He’d always remember that day, he said, because it was Veterans Day and he’d tried to mail the card but the post office was closed and he couldn’t buy a stamp. Anyway, for the hell of it he asked the woman behind the counter about a lead he’d been tracking for months, and it turned out the old railway worker he was looking for lived with his granddaughter less than two blocks away from where he was standing. This was the turning point supposedly in his search for the Spanish mission treasure: “the linchpin in his chain of clues” was how he put it.

  So Simon made a second jump to the drugstore and waited for Bill Ryan—strictly a viewing session this time; he was going to just float on the edge of the ether and eavesdrop. He hung around the ceiling, watching for him through the window. He had time to look over an old ’56 Chevy parked outside and check
out the magazines and newspapers on the rack near the door—at least he had the date right. While he was playing at being a see-through balloon a kid came in and bought some multicolored plastic streamers for the handlebars of his bike; he watched him go outside and attach them to the handgrips. Just as Bill Ryan showed up and bought the birthday card.

  Simon waited for the right moment, hanging there over Ryan’s head as he fished out the forty-five cents for the card. The woman in the blue-on-green print dress behind the counter put the card in a paper sack, took his two quarters, and rang it up. She smiled along with the cash register bell—it was a textbook Pavlovian, mindless smile.

  He had to decide whose head to mess with. The woman’s memory or Bill Ryan’s impulse to pose the question?

  He was over near the woman now, his ethereal hand close to her graying hair (it was tied in a bun on top of her head). Simon’s pseudo-hand brushed against it, passing through the stray hairs that fell around the nape of her neck. He tried telling her she felt nauseous, queasy, a bit dizzy. Close up the store and put your feet up for a few minutes; get rid of this customer so you can close up. Take an Alka-Seltzer, maybe. It’s been a long day. Close up; take a break. Over and over till the smile faded. He picked up on the state of her life in the process: how important Veterans Day was to her, a son lost in the Korean War, the secret pleasure she took in the attention it brought down on her, this one day of the year when her sorrow could be celebrated.