A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  They had reached the craggy rock face at the end of the beach; there was shade here and they sat down on an outcropping and just watched and listened for a few minutes. The water and shore having an argument. Pam reached over and took his hand in both of hers. A plane took off from the airport. They watched it rise from the line of distant palms and rooftops like a miracle, a conjuror’s illusion.

  “I believe you,” she said then, reaching up to his cheek and gently turning his head, making him look at her. He kissed her on the forehead—tasting salt, feeling grit on his tongue—and then on the lips. The messages, the pictures, coming freely, unfettered. It scared him that it could be this good; and he sensed a fear in Pam too. A flash of something with stark, absolute boundaries—a void, a black fissure of numbing cold oblivion. Opening up, never closing.

  Her hand let go of his and ended up at her mouth—he could hear it: the click of her teeth shearing off a sliver of fingernail.

  When Peter called that morning she had been watching a documentary about allergies and dust mites (she was still in bed watching television—clearing her head from the residual rant of dreams—nothing concrete: it was all mush by the time she opened her eyes, like a watercolor painting left out in the rain—smeared into a muddy nothing). The show was about tiny spider things that hang out in pillows and couch cushions and live off human skin. The thousands of tiny fragments of skin people shed constantly. It was their main source of food—only source of food. Dead skin. Pam figured the expert on the tube was probably one of those kids she remembered from school who got their jollies from grossing out the girls with live worms or dead flies. He was smiling now and saying “It’s fortunate for us they don’t like raw, fresh, uncooked skin.”

  She turned off the TV and a word came into her head: Necrophage. Then the man from the TV program’s voice saying “consumers of death.” That happened sometimes. The soundtrack of the show would be playing through her head as if her mind were still tuned in to the station. Words she would not normally use, never mind know the meaning of, would come out of nowhere. Pam was suspicious of words, the power of them; the people who used them like a loaded gun.

  Chowing down on the dead. We all do that, she thought. Eating was killing; but not eating was death. The puzzle of it made her yawn. And nail-biting—eating yourself. What was that all about?

  It’s their shit we’re allergic to, supposedly—the protein in the shit, fifteen different types of it. Dust mite shit under our noses all night long. Thanks for that little tidbit of information, she thought to herself. That’ll help me sleep tonight. She remembered one of her mother’s favorite expressions: “Don’t shit where you eat,” and she wondered whether there was a wise old dust mite out there somewhere in Dead Skin City who tried to tell all the other dust mites something like that. Whether they did in fact eat in one place and shit somewhere else. Sort of a dust mite code of behavior regarding which part of the couch cushion or pillow to shit in and which part was reserved for dining on all those bits of skin. She doubted it somehow. People, so-called intelligent beings, didn’t even follow this basic rule—she thought of the tradition in some countries of eating only with the right hand, and using the other one to wipe yourself, supposedly. The left being the shit-wiping hand, which was kind of a piss-off for people like Peter who were left-handed.

  Don’t shit where you eat. Maybe having a relationship with Peter was something like that—mixing business with your personal life. So what. If this is eating shit, then fine. I’ll have to deal with the consequences.

  Coprophage came into her mind then—the word “coprophage.” Someone or something that eats shit. The TV show again, maybe. She was still tuned in to the program.

  She crossed the room feeling dust mites between her toes all of a sudden, nibbling at her calluses—once you know something you can never ever not know it, her history teacher in high school had said one day, and now that she knew that, it occurred to her in an elliptical way that she would never be able to not know that once you were told something new you would never be able to not know it . . . Dust mites everywhere I look now—for the rest of my life. A room never being completely clean ever again.

  She picked up the remote (she had this habit of leaving the remote on top of the TV for some reason) and turned the TV back on. On impulse, she changed the station—to a show about a man who couldn’t figure out why his wife had left him—a talk show, one of those nondescript Oprah knockoffs—“. . . just because I drink my own urine,” he said. The medicinal benefits spelled out in a book he’d read. No harm to anyone, especially his wife, he said, only to himself. In the privacy of his own home.

  “The kitchen or the bathroom?” That’s what the Oprah clone lady said she’d like to know, frowning and smirking at the same time, waggling her big dildo microphone, playing up to the self-righteous bearbaiting whoops and groans of the studio audience.

  Don’t shit where you eat.

  That was going to be the clincher after the next commercial break; Pam knew it for a fact. She turned off the set and put on some more clothes—different clothes: the cleanest clothes she could find. She took an orange out of the fridge because she needed something in her stomach and it was the only thing she could think of putting into her body right then that wouldn’t make her retch. Knowledge is a good thing, she told herself. You are what you know. You are what you eat. I am an info-phage. An info-phage, a nymphophage.

  Sometimes it would be nice to just shut everything out, she thought. Take a pill that would shut down her so-called gift. Booze did it but only for an hour or so; the side effects weren’t worth it. Maybe a pill to take away part of your memory for a day or two. A week. A sort of what-you-don’t-know-won’t-hurt-you pill. A mind vacation from all the shit.

  Hearing the sudden sound of the phone was like falling through river ice. The knowledge that it was Peter like a clean, warm, bubble bath.

  32

  . . . the day Aldous Huxley took his last trip

  Shadow puppets in the trees—that’s how Simon saw them: everyone now. Even himself. Blotches of silver oxide on emulsified paper. That’s all I am to these people—the theorists, Simon thought. Paranoia turned into a career. Conspiracy. The breathing together. Men who breathe together speak the same language—that’s what it came down to. Companions: people who share bread. All these words no one ever took the trouble to decipher anymore. Words evicted from the family home. Rootless. No fixed address.

  Simon as a patch of underexposed black-and-white film.

  Dallas—November 22, 1963.

  He was practicing his craft, his new vocation: corporeal manifestation in the past—and in this instance fucking with Peter Abbott’s astral head. He’d heard from Larry that Peter had done an “11-22” already. That was the code name for the target—the day Kennedy was assassinated back in 1963. It was the nickname for the client as well—this rich old bugger who couldn’t get enough of this stuff. This was one of Peter’s sessions he hadn’t noticed that day he’d remote viewed the lab and found the target list in Peter’s file.

  But it was out of curiosity more than anything else. Like all those people who had made the pilgrimage to Kensington Palace to watch Lady Di’s flowers wilt in the sun.

  Simon was playing at being the mysterious figure silhouetted against the dapple of tree shadow on the grassy knoll. THE grassy knoll. The only grassy knoll left now. “Grassy” and “knoll” could never be conjoined in innocence again. Tristan and Isolde; Abbott and Costello. Juliet and the other one. Living in sin; the sin of knowledge, of being known.

  Like the word “Madonna”—the name itself hijacked the etymology. Deflowered it. A grunge band he once hung out with in Vancouver used the name Grassy Knoll Coward for a while. That was something else, though: a knee-jerk allusion turned into a kind of poetry. A verbal Escher.

  Simon had a theory about Madonna, not really a conspiracy theory, not unless you were really paranoid. More a thesis than a theory. The sound of her name was re
ally a subconscious simulacrum of baby talk—a Piaget pidgin English version of the word “McDonald’s.”

  It was all there if you looked for it. Her breasts in the “Blonde Ambition” tour, the gold-lamé bullet-nosed bra—a Jungian recapitulation of the infant response to the Golden Arches. Women’s breasts viewed from a toddler’s perspective, from below, looked a lot like the golden arches. The double N’s blurred and slurred into the double M’s of the word “MoM” elided into an overlapping vowel-less MM.

  “MMMMM.” Things that make you go “MMMMM.” With your mouth around a teat there’s no room for vowels: “I want to go to Ma’donna’.” Kids weaned on the stuff, sucking back chocolate shakes: “I want to go to Ma’donna’.” Imprinted with her name way before puberty—all that mouth/Mom pleasure setting them up for a major pop fixation. Oral/aural—all the same really—pop music ultimately about what goes in the mouth. What comes out of the mouth, out of the body—then into someone else’s body.

  Back in the tree-dappled shadows again. Dealey Plaza, Dallas; the overpass with the picket fence. Simon back in the trees out of the sun, watching it all unfold—the JFK thing. Best seat in the house; knowing Peter was here too doing an RV session, flapping in the ether like a dead leaf. Simon wondered how naive this crowd really was—how many other temporal tourists were here for the hot-ticket item of the sixties: JFK’s farewell tour.

  Simon’s mind kept going astray, here of all places—unable to focus on the best show in town. He could always do a replay of course, pull back up and out into the ether, back into his real-time body and charge his batteries for a few days, come back later. But shit, he was here now, his body solid, stable, obviously none of his relatives had anything to do with all this—which was kind of surprising given the politics of the nut-case uncles on his mother’s side.

  Here we go . . . He could hear the motorcycle engines off in the distance, the faint applause from the crowds further up Main Street, up near Houston Street, he figured, where the route took them snuggling up to the base of the Texas School Book Depository.

  He pulled up a piece of grass and looked at it, the banality of it, commonplace blades of grass—grassy knoll grass. Like some Walt Whitman poem—cosmic in its humility. He brought it to his nose and sniffed: half-dead with a rotting hay smell—the banality of evil, the sense that this place and time were pivotal to the flow of things only in retrospect. The moment a simple transaction of colliding subatomic particles like any other few minutes in the course of things—all transformed into the heft of history by attention.

  He watched the motorcade make the final turn, the heat shivering over the pavement, the sunlight a silent solar wind pummeling a thousand eyes—the popping echo of gunshots making the crowd wonder what to do—some of them reacting the way they had learned to react—a man pulling his small son to the ground and shielding him with his flesh, his own sack of blood. Others looking for guidance, a word from above. The go-ahead to weep.

  The President there all of a sudden as if he’d made his entrance a few beats too soon. Hunched over like someone in prayer needing a moment to himself—a person dying in his wife’s arms. Then a plume of wine-red mist. The God turned into flesh.

  Simon got up and ran with the others, acting the way he should—randomly, in confusion, resisting the urge to wave as the motorcade sped away under the overpass.

  33

  Browsing the ether . . .

  “Just tell me you have a target. I don’t need this coordinate stuff. It only confuses me.”

  “Don’t tell Ingo Swann that,” Susan said, adjusting the light over the desk.

  “What?”

  “Ingo Swann. One of the pioneers. Really legendary remote viewer—I actually met him once in New York, at an exhibition of his paintings. Worked for SRI in the eighties. Stanford Research Institute? Devised a relatively foolproof remote viewing procedure using geographic coordinates called SCANATE. He swore by it, trained a lot of remote viewers in it. For some people it just didn’t make any difference, though—whether they were given actual coordinates or not. Like you, I guess,” Susan said, setting out the pen and paper. “Now Simon—he needs coordinates. Larry too, but sometimes he gets them wrong. Anita and Peter, they need a link.”

  Pam didn’t like the recliner either—it made her think of dentists and gynecologists, doctors in general: she hated them with a passion. She preferred this kind of session, where they let her sit at a desk, go into a trance, and doodle on a huge sheet of paper—or chatter on about whatever was coming through. It was sort of like going on a vacation and giving someone the play-by-play over the phone.

  “By the way, there’s no target; we just want to see how far you can go, where it takes you. We’re going to let you off the leash for this one.” She smiled and said, “Okay, Pam, it’s time,” putting on her soothing bedside manner voice. That’s all Pam needed—one cue. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander—finally drifting into alpha near-sleep, her finger coming up to her mouth once, before she fell into a deep slide through darkness, light swirls, then darkness again. She felt her body slump back into the chair.

  This freewheeling approach to remote viewing was like tuning in distant shortwave radio signals—it was a slow, perpendicular scan of energies and static, and lopsided voices—as if she were the needle on the tuner drifting up and down the wave band. The ether as shopping mall. She was window shopping, brushing up against the merchandise, then drifting away, coming down to touch it, floating up and away again, till something else caught her attention . . .

  . . . the smell of horse dung, and sweat, horse breath turning to mist in the cool morning air, a dank gray sky off in the distance over rolling fields, frozen lightning-bolt silhouettes of leafless tree branches high above her head. The thudding of restless hooves, snorts, and the rattle of tack—and a male voice heavy with dialect: “This one ’ere ought not be afeared as much as your mount.”

  “Aye. An’ thank God the rain be abated. This’n ’ld ’ave me arse over end if we come to mud.” Then something under his breath she could not even break out into words of any kind.

  The man who had spoken first dismounted—he was short and thick around the waist; his soft cap was tied under his bearded chin like a scarf—and another man with long dark hair wearing a short leather jacket took the reins of the suddenly skittish horse.

  The scene transposed into bright light now, the rant of many horses galloping by; then the squeal of something pig-like; the smell of fear, the sound of angry voices and ringing steel . . .

  Car horns tooting, old cars with horns that clowns use, what Harpo Marx used in all his movies. Bright sunlight falling on a green tablecloth—a card game. Face cards were fanned across the center of the table; with the ace of clubs on top. Lace-trimmed sleeves—tiny female hands taking up the cards, hands with fingernails like whittled rubies. The scent of roses and opened oranges.

  “If you think that, Olivia, you’re as big a fool as he is . . .” Laughter from the others. Olivia smiles (Pam knows it’s Olivia), her teeth exposed then—crooked, discolored—

  “If it’s foolish to want a simple answer from a man, then—” Up, away—a sudden shift . . .

  . . . the sun is in her eyes, she is on a train; light flickering now as the train passes through dappled shadow, a landscape of hedgerows and fields of grain, a listing shed spilling hay, a forlorn swaybacked horse near a fence. The rhythmic clatter of wheels over track seams. She is with. No. Inside a little girl, there in the thick of who she is. Pam can feel the tight knee-socks pinching her shins, her small legs dangling above the floor. She needs to urinate. She can smell sun-warmed cloth. It’s the itchy wool fabric of the seats. A man in an overcoat is sitting across from her; he is smiling in her direction while holding a newspaper with one hand and stroking the skin under his chin with the other. She can see part of a headline: MORRO CASTLE BURNS AT SEA: 134 LOSE THEIR—He is her father—he is taking her to see her grandmother. The compartment door slides open and a
uniformed man with a watch chain across his waistcoated chest steps into the compartment. The sound of the train is transmuted by his entrance, as if the cool air it allows into the confined space were affecting her sense of hearing . . . a shift, a pull-up, then a sudden, wrenching convoluted transposition . . .

  “Can a man be so inconsiderate that he would say such a thing at a time like that? I ask you—if he were my husband he wouldn’t be for long!” There is laughter again. Olivia is dealing now—her small fat hands are white and puffy, blotched with pink. She plods through the process as if each card were something unique, new to her, of a differing shape and heft. Some of the cards seem to flip over as if by their own free will . . .

  A calming cool breeze across her face—the face she can feel now, as if it were her own; she is in bright sunlight; she can see the tops of snow-capped mountains all around her—level with her eyes, on equal terms with her point of view. The air is cold and her feet feel constricted; they are clamped into tight boots, she realizes. The sunlight is filtered through goggles; she sees everything through an orange, sunglass hue. She is skiing—springing and dipping into turns, her body doing things she has never been able to do before—cutting through the compliant snow. The horizon of mountains against the blue sky is like an edge of torn paper. She stops to catch her breath, turning her face into the sun, and is overwhelmed with the scent of sun-warmed lodgepole pine trees, suntan lotion; the taste of coconut and vanilla on her lips, again something to keep out the sun—gloves holding poles . . .

  . . . shifting, spreading, the ether ripples and she is up and out of the skier, pulled by something way off to her left . . . I was enjoying that, let me . . . tumbling out and up, high, peak high, the skiers below, pencil dots on distant veins of white against the dirty green-black of the tree-covered mountainside . . .