A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  30

  Simon says, “Do this . . . Do that . . .”

  It was like a hangover—the headache, the muzzy corona of bland glare that circled everything he looked at. Simon lay on the bed for a few more minutes thinking about what he had just done—or thought he’d just done—the stink of baby shit still with him. In your head, he told himself. You couldn’t have brought it back with you. Raising his arm to smell his armpit. No. That was something else—honest sweat from an honest day’s work. Plugging a hole where the air gets it. Fixing an asshole. He told himself again how he had done the world a favor. “Gordon Quarendon—an asshole with a capital ‘O,’” he said out loud, coughing through the end of it. His throat dry, feeling worked over, as if he’d been screaming.

  Simon got off the bed and had a shower; he put on a fresh shirt and a pair of jeans, a clean pair of sweat socks—he couldn’t find his shoes. They were not where he’d left them; and were at the same time—in his mind, two sets of shoes. It was as if he knew where they were but chose not to look there—because that was not where he’d left them.

  I killed the fucker, didn’t I? Not just disappeared him, but actually killed the little fucker. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. His coordinates off by a mile, a month or two. A baby, for Christ’s sake. He was talking to himself—his own voice inside his head. A sneering conscience-of-the-world voice nagging at him. Like something in a Frank Zappa song. Again, he could be mistaken—it could be all a dream, a hallucination. Wishful thinking.

  He twirled the rod on the venetian blinds and dazzled himself with sunlight. The same as before: the view of scrub, a few palm trees off to the left. The sun hitting on everyone and everything. The cyan sea. Too much of a good thing, he thought then—all this too-good-to-be-true weather. Cartoon weather. Bananas, cranberry juice martinis—cyan, magenta, yellow. Was this new or did he always feel that way about the place? He couldn’t tell—the fuzziness again, the double image. His brain seeing everything through a bad prescription, or someone else’s glasses. No. A quadruple image, if you count the Tate variations complicating things. This is the price you pay, he told himself. The memory karma thing. You break it, you pay for it. Revising history meant he had to keep the old edition on the shelf as well.

  He made his way down the stairs and out to the path that led to the main building, to the dining room and cluster of common rooms that surrounded the pool. Anita, Jane, Peter—no Polythene Pam, thank God. Larry wearing a straw hat that was too small for him. But no Gordon. All of them sitting there laughing; smiling now at what Jane was saying, her hands doing things in the sunlight—bird things, Simon thought; her hands like wings. They were having breakfast, a late breakfast it looked like, what his mom used to call “brunch”—the last of it anyway; the guy clearing away the dishes looking up as Simon came over as if he were about to ruin his day by sitting down and ordering something.

  The conversation died as he came closer; Peter Abbott turned in his chair to look at him. There was a disheveled quality about the guy today, his hair in need of a wash. His eyes seemed to be unfocused or locked on to something beyond the horizon—a hangover, maybe. Like what he was going through. A Pam hangover. He wondered what Peter Abbott saw in her. Skinny, spaced-out Pam. Something Manson wouldn’t even bother with.

  Simon dragged a chair over from another table—no one made an effort to make room for him, so he squeezed in between Larry and Anita. “So what’s for breakfast?” He looked around in a fake theatrical way at their used plates. Bits of toast on one; Jane’s with an omelet leaking runny cheese, her knife and fork together on the plate angled at five o’clock like the etiquette books say you’re supposed to do—telling everyone she’d had enough.

  “You missed it, man. You missed the boat,” Larry said, laughing his wide-open laugh (Simon hadn’t missed it: he could see some of it now between Larry’s war-torn teeth), laughing too long and too loud and looking around the table as if he were being witty. As if the “boat” reference were actually funny. Gravy boat maybe? Simon gave up trying to make the connection.

  “We were talking about Calliope’s board of directors; the shareholders. What do you think? Should they call the shots? Or the stiffs down on the floor doing all the grunt work.” Anita’s voice sometimes seemed to tell her what to say, the rough words coming out as if her racked throat were actually doing the thinking for her, picking words from a smoky gangster movie. The skin around her collarbones like something on a roasted chicken, Simon noticed then. A nice face, a not-bad body for a woman her age—but the skin . . .

  Jane smiled and raised her eyebrows once in his direction—telegraphing the rules: this is just a game and we want you to play along.

  “Money talks,” he said, winking at Jane, telling her he could come up with rules of his own. Flirting with her. “We listen.”

  “If the money’s big enough, it screams and we just jump like a bunch of trained chimpanzees.” Anita was looking down at her coffee cup, not even caring to see if anyone was responding to what she said. She put her face in her hands and slowly raised her head through a yawn.

  Peter Abbott stood up and almost fell down. He stumbled as if his legs had stopped working for an instant. He reached out for the back of Anita’s chair and she turned in time to grab his arm but she knocked her coffee cup over in the process. A tongue of brown liquid crept across the white tablecloth.

  “Jesus, Pete. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, fine. Something I ate maybe—too much sun. I don’t know.” Peter fell back into his chair and Larry leaned over and offered him his untouched glass of water. Jane was on her feet next to him now; looking into his eyes; asking him if he felt faint; feeling his forehead, for God’s sake. Maybe that’s the trick with Jane, Simon thought. The Mother thing: she needed to mother. Touch me, for Christ’s sake. Touch MY fucking forehead, why don’t you?

  Peter Abbott sat there looking around as if he’d lost something; and for a moment Simon thought, Oh shit, he knows—paranoia creeping up on him.

  But he couldn’t know. He’d snuffed Gordon as close to conception as he possibly could. Sure, he’d missed by a week or two—something in his own family history had deflected him from his target—but what difference would that really make? Gordon Quarendon was a nonentity now, a victim of crib death. He’d been barely alive, really. An abortion with a bad case of colic. Not really a complete person—a potential person, at best. Even the full-grown Gordon was barely a potential person for that matter.

  Jane was still giving Peter Abbott all kinds of attention, her tight little butt rubbing against the table for a second, shifting things slightly—making Larry’s glass of water shimmy for an instant. Blue shorts today. Bermudas. A snug white T-shirt embossed with the lines of her bra. Vanilla skin, chocolate mousse skin airbrushed by God, Simon thought. Perfect skin. He felt drool coming on, for God’s sake. He turned away and watched Anita instead, and concentrated on the floral sack she was wearing today, how it defeated the prurient imagination. She got up then, as if she could feel the affront of what he was using her for, and walked over to the pool. She lit up and started smoking the cigarette like she was giving the fucking thing head.

  Simon couldn’t take it anymore. Watching Jane was torture, watching Larry was torture at the other end of the spectrum. And watching Anita smoke made him think of Jane again. He got up, sent phony smiles all round, and headed for the lounge.

  With Larry tagging along behind him, catching up. He was saying something about the session he’d done the day before: his breath like old socks this morning: old socks and garlic toast. Simon grabbed a cup of machine coffee and a mummified Danish that had never been close to Denmark, at the same time feigning interest in what Larry was saying—what the inside of a sunken German U-boat looked like after fifty years, how well the North Atlantic had treated these encapsulated Nazis.

  Simon finally shucked off Larry and headed over to the reception area of the main building. It served as Calliope’s
interface with the outside world; it was where Eli’s and Jane’s offices were, and a big corner office reserved for the CEO who was never there.

  It was a typical sort of business office: full of computers and filing cabinets; fax machines; the accounts department, where the paychecks came from. Down the hall from that, around the back, was a porch with a Coke machine and a few benches—the place where the menials reported for duty every morning. The janitorial staff; the guys that woke everyone up with their fucking leaf blowers.

  He passed the receptionist—she smiled her recognition of him—and headed down a hallway through a few glass doors till he reached the small vestibule that served as a kind of psychological air lock between the administration area and the labs. It was like a waiting room in a dentist’s office—plain Scandinavian couches, a coffee table piled with magazines, travel posters on the wall telling everyone to come on down to St. Martin /Sint Maarten. Another wall was taken up by a large bulletin board. The cork surface had been gridded off with masking tape into two-dimensional pigeonholes; it served as a message center for the lab staff: the remote viewers and the technical support team. The names of the psi operatives took up the top row—laser-printed in block letters—six of them at last count. Alphabetically of course: Abbott, Gilford, Hayward, McEwan, Spalding . . . now only five.

  No Quarendon. Gordon’s space taken over by Anita’s now—nothing where hers had been—a few hours ago? He remembered picking up his messages this morning (or had it been last night after dinner?), the latest pep letter from Jane; a hand-scrawled note from Blenheim. Stuff about his “lax attitude” toward post-session paperwork, or some shit like that.

  Gordon/no Gordon. That simple: the perfect crime even if he had made a bit of a mess of it. Get what you can from someone, then dispose of them. Cruel, yes, but once he had perfected the process, there wouldn’t be any suffering involved. Sorry, Gord. You were my crash-test dummy. All very clinical and civilized, really. Very Twenty-first Century. Very Avengers, when he thought about it. Retro but without the hokey sixties matte-black-painted cardboard props—all swooping sign-wave whistles and tiny flashing lights. Mrs. Peel would approve, he thought. John Steed would doff his bowler hat.

  The gap, the overlay, the bifurcation of memory. One second a world with Gordon Quarendon, the next a world without. The dowsing lesson still there, though—the technique of dowsing a map, fresh enough to stick.

  He knew how to dowse maps now, with his St. Christopher medal; and that would help him find the coordinates of whatever he was aiming for. Spatial coordinates. He couldn’t go anywhere without reference points.

  He headed back out to the front of the building along the hall that took him past Jane’s office. As he passed her door he could hear her voice, intermittent laughing—she was on the phone. His recollection of his lesson with Gordon had been somewhat diluted by a parallel memory from that day, he realized then. Clouded by a fuzzy gauze of a memory concerning Jane. It was lying on top of the original like a piece of tracing paper. Something incidental but telling—about what she thought of him. Something she had said about the scar on the top of his head, he remembered then. The look in her eyes when she asked him about it. The mothering thing again, the concern. It had been there for him too. At least, that’s how he remembered it.

  31

  What wine do you serve with little bits of skin?

  Just like turning on a flashlight with dead batteries—an instant of white health fading to amber, then nothing. The next day Peter awoke from a turmoiled sleep with a flash of clarity that quickly dimmed to muddled panic. In that lucid moment he knew he wasn’t responsible; it wasn’t all in his head—he wasn’t crazy. Gordon Quarendon had once been—and now he wasn’t.

  Pam was still asleep. She sighed and rolled away from him. In the waxing dawn light he could see where her shoulder was imprinted with creases: the intaglio of fabric leaving its mark—next to a scar on her upper arm he hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it hadn’t even been there to notice till now and the world out there had changed in a myriad of ways he would never be able to delineate. Pam with the scar; Pam without. He wanted to wake her up and quiz her on all she’d ever told him about herself. He moved closer and kissed the back of her neck—white skin where the hair was parted. The musky scent of her, the continuo beneath the melody of her shampoo.

  Gordon was gone from the earth, had never walked the wrinkled face of it; he knew that for a fact somehow. A hole in the universe that had once been Gordon Quarendon. Even the hole had been swallowed up, healed over. All that was left of him was in Peter’s head: his memories and his alone, no one else’s. His mind glanced off a passing notion (it was like a stone rising from the flow of a stream) that that wasn’t the case. Gordon’s existence was mirrored in someone else’s memory too. And then it was gone—the tracks and traces of it lost in the blizzard of wakefulness.

  Why me? he thought then. Like the only survivor of a plane crash. Just the way he seemed to be the only one who still clearly remembered Ron Koch.

  He could accept it, to some degree—this curse of remembering—as one of his special gifts that he must carry like schoolbooks—his homework—for the rest of his life. But what made him question his mind’s authority was the layer upon layer of parallel memories. Gordon without Ron, Ron without Gordon. The clutter of chance encounters in the day-to-day percolation of people at Calliope, all reconfigured, rechoreographed with neither of them around, both of them around. One of them around. The other one around.

  The day before, when Gordon had disappeared from the breakfast table, Peter had kept his mouth shut. Gordon there one moment, gone the next. The rough-cut splice of one reality slapping up against the other. The shift had left his heart swaying, his torso like an unevenly loaded washing machine. He’d spent the rest of the morning in a jet lag of sorts, his head awash in a deluge of conflicted memories—the world had shifted under his feet, under his soul.

  He’d gone back to his room and phoned Pam. She was still in bed, she said; but that was okay: “I should be up anyway. Give me twenty minutes.” They went for a walk along the road and down the path through spiky scrub and struggling beach grape to the ocean. To the insistent breeze and the rhythmic pulse of waves scrolling up the beach.

  “It wasn’t like what happened to Ron Koch—it couldn’t have been. Gordon was sitting right there in front of me. Something else or someone else did it to him.”

  She looked at him and he could see she was trying very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. She was eating an orange; she kept the peel folded into her hand, not wanting to let it go, taking each segment like medicine, it seemed to Peter. Along with his words. She hated breakfast, she nibbled and fueled her way through the day till suppertime, scuttling her blood sugar with binges of potato chips and chocolate bars.

  She was there listening to him at least, and that made it all right to some degree—even if it was all in his head. Something to build on; it came to mind how important that was—a constant. Consistency had never been very important to him till now. The ritual of doing a show every night was the closest he’d ever come to it. The repetition of lines, gestures and cues, the routines of backstage business and politics—he had always taken it all for granted. Now he craved it, yearned for it, like the playback loop of wave-hitting-beach, wave-hitting-beach—the varied sameness, like breathing.

  “Maybe this Gordon guy imploded because of something he was going to do—in the future. Isn’t that what happened to Ron? I mean, if you were with Ron, say, back in nineteen seventy whatever, when he supposedly died, it wouldn’t look like he had anything to do with it either, right?” They had crossed the Sahara of sunstroked sand to the band of darker, cooler stuff at the water’s edge. Peter watched as Pam took off her sandals, looking over her shoulder and lifting her feet up behind her one after the other. She carried the shoes now with her middle finger hooked through the heel loops.

  “Why me, though? Why am I the only person who remembers him?”
He reached out and put his hand gently against the middle of her back—spread across the soft pages of flesh on either side of the spine. The touch was like a warm bath washing through the center of him—and the immediate sense that she was enjoying it too. One of the rewards of their psychic abilities. It scared him to think what it would be like if it ever turned around. The prospect of knowing without a doubt when someone stopped caring for you.

  “You know who I’m talking about, right?” Peter called out over the rush of the sea. “Gordon Quarendon. The motormouth dowser. Tall guy with a ponytail. Do you remember anything at all?”

  “I don’t know, it could be you talking about him and I’m picking up on your memories; sort of vague impressions, more like someone you’ve never met before showing up in a dream.” She was teasing the bubbled edge of an advancing wave with her bare feet, the wash of it like a spilled bucket of soap suds. “You know. The sense of him without the big picture.”

  “Maybe he never existed and it’s all in my head and now I’ve planted a seed of it in your head.” He kicked at the water. “Shit. It’s so fucking frustrating.”

  “We could check it out like they did with Ron Koch. See if he ever did exist somewhere.”

  Peter thought of Anita then, the humiliation of being compelled to make what seemed like unreasonable demands—the stance of the uncool. The protestations, the squawkings of the deluded. He suddenly felt closer to what she must have gone through when Ron had disappeared.