A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “—the two-call thing, you know? Anyway she gives me her number and she’s like ‘Call me, call me tomorrow’—shit, sometimes you should just shut your brain off. I’m thinking, wait a day, don’t look too eager, be cool—too late, man. I call her. I call one more time, leave a message. Two calls, man—nothing.” They are out in front of a restaurant. Two young guys drinking coffee. One of them has his cap on backwards.

  Pam knows exactly where she is, when it is—December of last year; a place in the Los Feliz part of LA, right off Number Five next to a pokey little golf course on the edge of Griffith Park: chairs and tables, red umbrellas out front—a place called EATZ—a hamburger place—great milk shakes, a pretty good Cobb salad. (This fact is rising from the one wearing the cap like steam from hot soup). The traffic noise seems married to the sun’s glare—a Volkswagen goes by with a Christmas tree tied to the roof, an X marking the butt end of the stump.

  The other one is talking now: “I was beat up in a bar one time. They called an ambulance, they put me on the gurney and the guy says this ride to the hospital’s going to cost you seventy-five bucks; so I started getting up and he’s holding me down saying I shouldn’t move or anything. Shit, I wasn’t going to pay seventy-five bucks, I could drive my car over there, for Christ’s sake.”

  A skinny rake of a guy comes by pushing a shopping cart stacked above his head with flattened cardboard boxes; there’s a rope around it to pull it so he can get far enough ahead of it to hold on to the wide load; he’s easing it along the broken sidewalk, gently working it over the cracks. He scuttles around it like a hummingbird around hibiscus, husbanding it along. His payload, his take for the day. He’s wearing flip-flops.

  A woman in shorts and a halter top at another table is taking the glass of chocolate milk the waitress has brought over for her little boy and drinking the first inch so he won’t spill it. She puts it in front of him and his face creases up as if the glass of chocolate milk were something else now, transformed into garbage already—he looks up at his mom and asks for a straw.

  An older guy with a beard comes along walking a dog; it looks like a brown and white sheep dog. He ties the dog’s leash to the wrought-iron railing that surrounds the eatery’s outdoor area and comes around to sit at the table nearest the dog . . .

  Back, back, and up out of there pulled back along a corridor, a swirling tunnel of blue light, then pink, then yellow. The time line is shifting; she is falling through the ether toward something big, a gravity well of meaning, heavy with more meaning than she cares to comprehend . . .

  There is blood and the afterglow of death, butchery—everywhere, the heat of the sun like a steam iron pressed against her face. The standing shock wave in the fixed noon heat. The sudden revving of engines, motorcycle exhaust. Cars with flags on them go by—Stars and Stripes, the presidential standard—flapping with ingenuous joy; a woman drops her roses and climbs out of the backseat of a dark blue convertible. Not out of the door but up over the backrest. The car is speeding up as she crawls on her hands and knees back onto the trunk. She is reaching for something—part of what has come undone . . .

  “Pam? You okay? Come on, Pam. Hello?”

  Pam’s cheek was on top of her paper, the pen scrawls close to her eyes—her eyes were closed but she could see all the pages at once, overlapped like acetate animation cells. There was a splayed patch of drool under her mouth; it had blistered the paper and smudged the black marker ink into blue. It was a jagged-line drawing of the man with his arms straight out, legs apart—a skydiver pose. The head was smeared with dilute blue ink; flares of smudged spittle radiated from it as if the hair were on fire or he was bleeding and falling headfirst, the blood somehow ahead of him, vested with a new law of gravity, farther down the road he was traveling—ahead of him like a prophecy.

  34

  . . . the Italian job

  It was Larry who was really getting on his nerves now. Simon had taken a recreational spin back to the swinging sixties: London, January 29, 1967, at the Saville Theatre in Soho. Jimi Hendrix battling with the Who. Strictly a viewing session, this time. Ten minutes of it hanging over the audience, soaking it up. The sound was bad, the amps breaking into a staccato hum, Hendrix not as amazing as he’d expected. The crowd looking like a bunch of scarecrows—but it was an Historic Event, supposedly. Simon came out of it with his ears ringing, not the internal ringing he was plagued with now and then, but the real thing—inner-ear damage, as if he’d been there in the flesh.

  Larry came right up to him the next day and said he’d been watching him. Smiling like it was a big fucking joke. “Videotape of rock music; your signature on it,” he said. “Blenheim thinks it’s my fault.” He looked like a newspaper-whipped puppy for a second. “My mind wandering, I guess—but you know? I was focused. I was really focused this time. On a nuclear plant or something, a chemicals plant maybe, somewhere in Syria or Tibet—someplace like that.”

  “A rock concert, huh? Was I with a chick? Was I having fun or was I striking out?” Simon turned away and opened his Wall Street Journal.

  Blenheim took him aside later that day and told him pretty well what Larry had said about his “signature” showing up on Larry’s monitors—with a bit more technical jargon thrown in to make his own dick feel bigger, Simon figured. He led him into his office and did the power body language thing: he directed Simon to a low soft couch, then perched himself on the edge of his desk so that Simon had to look up when he spoke to him. Transparent shit, but it probably had some effect anyway. The guy’s “Old Man River” voice didn’t help much either.

  What put Simon at a real disadvantage was the fact that it tailgated a session where he’d actually tried his best to get results. It had not gone well; looking back on it he wondered how it could have gone worse, really.

  It had been a session with a set of coordinates that weren’t really coordinates—just a name and a rough indication of where the target person would be: southern Italy near Naples. A hostage taking of some kind, a bunch of Veneto separatists behind it supposedly—that’s all Blenheim would tell him, high-priority stuff coming in over a secured fax line from some cloak-and-dagger organization—the Pentagon, or NSA; the CIA, maybe.

  “Just tell us where he is,” Susan had said. Susan, the techie with the face that seemed perfect in a bland sort of way, an attractively ideal face—the offspring of a suburban cheerleader/quarterback high-school-sweethearts-who-actually-got-married-and-had-kids kind of genetic coupling. Pleasantly attractive, but nothing to lose weight over.

  It took him about ten minutes to fall into the ganzfeld trance—Susan’s fingers rougher with the goggles than Jane’s—and slowly tumble his way over to Italy. And another few minutes to realize it wasn’t working; the coordinates were garbled. It was like losing vertical in the middle of a dive.

  It felt as if he were being pulled back out of the ether with a huge hand grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and suddenly straight-arming him back into his body, down into the recliner. The man he was looking for was out of reach all of a sudden—the contact broken, cut off. Even the sense of the guy, his location, none of it was coming through.

  Simon came out of it somewhat humbled by the experience, with nothing but a stray dreamlike image: a monk surrounded by animals—Saint Francis, for some reason, a painting (it had to be; it had no movement to it) of Saint Francis of Assisi—a man feeding a dog, birds on his shoulders, some swooping down around his head, one perched, one on his wrist pecking at the food in his hand—the food for the dog was being plucked from his fingers. That and the view of a mountain range, cypress trees nestled between distant hills, a deep turquoise sky.

  He opened his eyes, sat up, and asked for a piece of paper and a pencil. He started sketching and what came out of it was a series of arches: a big one flanked by two smaller ones, with the image of Saint Francis in the larger center section. “He’s near this painting, or he’s looking at it a lot. I don’t know, he could have been looking at it when
they got him. The time sequence of things isn’t too clear. And there’s a lot of smoke where he is. He’s having trouble breathing.”

  “A triptych.”

  “What?”

  “A triptych. It sounds like you’re talking about a triptych, a painting in three sections. Saint Francis, you say. Hold on, I’ll get back to you.”

  She was back in less than a minute, handing Simon a bottle of water, preparing him for something. Blenheim came in right behind her; the way he looked at her made Simon think of someone at a Burger King drive-through. “It’s all over,” he said. “They found him; he’s dead.”

  Simon twisted off the cap and took a drink without saying anything. He got out of the recliner and signed Susan’s clipboard—something they all had to do after a session, for some reason. It seemed pretty pretentious to Simon. Like bimbo anchorpersons on the five-o’clock news scribbling something on the pages of the copy in front of them; as if the latest mugging report or the mandatory upbeat tag story about the World’s Largest Enchilada was something so important that even its telling had to go down in history.

  And then the shakedown in Blenheim’s office. Right after the wonderful news about the foreign diplomat or whoever he was ending up dead in spite of Simon’s little dissertation about Saint Francis of Assisi.

  Blenheim folding his arms and looking into his eyes as if Simon were a kid who’d been caught stealing apples. The “Unauthorized Remote Viewing” lecture. The one about poor old Ron Koch, whoever he was—no one remembered the guy—the “implosion” factor. The stuff on Larry’s tapes. Warning him, “Any more tricks like that . . .” He raised his big blunt linebacker hand, the middle finger bent to one side so that it looked like he was doing a laid-back version of Mr. Spock’s famous salute. The threat left hanging in the silence between them. “I’m not going to ask for an explanation. I don’t care why you’re doing it, have done it. Just don’t let it happen again.”

  No mention of Gordon, thank God. So it had worked; no one pointing a finger at the big ugly hole floating around out there where Gordon used to be. He had gotten away with it; the perfect murder. Asshole with a capital “O.”

  He walked out of the office and along the corridor to the front door thinking, this is never going to end, is it? First Gordon, now Larry—Larry was turning into a pain in the ass Mr. 7-Eleven-Video-Surveillance-Camera. Obstacles in his way—all of them really, not just Larry. Anita was giving him the odd look every now and then; as if he smelled like rotting meat. Maybe she was picking up on all the stuff he was doing too. The ghost of Gordon Quarendon or some such shit visiting her in the middle of the night—telling her about his Studebaker and his cat, the number of lives it had used up already.

  He could always just leave, he supposed; but he didn’t want to—he was having too much fun watching history change right before his eyes. And the treasure waiting for him out in the New Mexico desert could do just that—wait. The three bags of gold were more like a nest egg in his mind now—his pension fund. What with his bank account here in St. Martin actually growing for a change. And for pocket money he would hit the casinos over in Philipsburg—and that big one in the Maho Beach Hotel.

  Simon had discovered that he could read the cards as they were dealt—just touching the green felt was enough. It was like completing an electric circuit. He would let his hands rest on the rim of his glass or his stack of chips, then every so often just graze the table’s surface with the tips of his fingers. It was like sparks going off in his brain: pretty kings and queens and an ugly four of clubs, the ace of spades like a Bantu god leaping into his head. He had it down to an art; he would let himself lose a hand or two every so often, just to keep the pit bosses at bay.

  And he told himself there would be plenty more where that came from if he set his mind to it—more of all kinds of stuff: fame, fortune, and beautiful lovers. Leaving your mark on the world—wasn’t that what it was all about? Some rock dude had said something like that once. The chicks/bucks/celebrity continuum. The Happiness Quotient. All he had to do now was clear away a few obstacles.

  Later in his room Simon lay on his bed and thought about what he had to do next: a little bit of extracurricular out-of-body in the here-and-now. It was going to be like a stroll in the park; he wouldn’t even need coordinates for this one. Simon could just leap out of his body and feel his way to the target. No corporeal manifestation, not unless he had to. A stroll down the hall, more like it. To Jane’s office.

  Data was notoriously hard to remote view, especially verbal data supposedly; it was hard to process, the wrong half of the brain doing all the work—negotiating the ether was like jazz improv, rather than algebra. Which was interesting because he hadn’t had any trouble with the photos on the roll of film that first time out—Jane’s little OBE entrance exam with the steel chest in the attic. That picture of the origami crane made out of newspaper: he sensed he could have unfolded the page in his mind and read the whole thing if he’d been so inclined. And that time he’d remote viewed Peter Abbott’s file on the desk in front of Jane had been a snap.

  If it didn’t work that way with file folders packed into a filing cabinet (he assumed that’s where he’d find the stuff; he couldn’t imagine an outfit like Calliope relying on computer data alone) he was prepared to do a physical jump, actually touch down in the office—drink the three glasses of water he needed for a CM; dehydration seemed to be an issue, he’d come to realize. The headaches and the ringing in his ears were connected to simply that: electrolyte depletion.

  If he was going to do away with Larry and the rest of the inmates here at Calliope, he had to get the jumps right from here on in; his timing couldn’t be off. He had to find their birth dates and work back from there. Conception being his only window of opportunity, morality-wise. He couldn’t face doing in another baby. Way too messy.

  Coitus interruptus was the cleanest way to do it—a sort of a Catholic Divine Intervention. The Pope wagging his finger, shaking his head—the Angel of Unlife coming down out of the sky in a Reverse Annunciation dynamic. Verily I say unto you . . . the fruit of thy loins shall not ripen, the seed of thy main squeeze shall leap from its conduit unfettered yet perish Onanesque on the barren wheat field of thy belly . . . blah, blah, blah—whatever . . .

  A deft little pinch to the scrotum, a knocked-over glass of flat champagne spoiling the moment—a strange apparition, maybe. Like something from A Christmas Carol—whatever it would take. A defective elevator, a missed phone call. His trick on his maiden voyage to see Mr. Manson had served him well—the hijacked car. Which reminded him—when he got back to the mainland he would park himself near a huge suburban Blockbuster Video and get a motel room with a VCR and a pile of Sharon Tate films; it would give him something to do between sessions of mucking with his fellow classmates here at Calliope High.

  Sharon Tate and a bottle of Smirnoff’s; and a half gallon of Tropicana’s Season’s Best Pure Orange Juice from Concentrate. That movie from the seventies: Robert Altman’s Nashville. The Woody Allen thing, even that B-grade piece of soft porn S&M shit she did in the late eighties he’d discovered in her autobiography, Roman Holiday: Polanski and Me, playing Brigitte Nielson’s mother, of all things.

  Thank God he was younger than all the other psychics at Calliope. Even Pam with her grunge fixation was older than he was. The implosion factor minimized at least, unless he was somehow related to these people—his fate tangled in one of their life lines in some way. Like what must have been the case with Gordon. The turbulence that had thrown him off target.

  Accurate birth dates. He didn’t want to screw up like the last time. He would have to get it all from the Calliope files. Jane’s files—dip into her ironclad little filing cabinet. Do a Watergate. Power corrupts, and all that. Shit, why not? Go back to Sharon Tate’s senior prom, show up in a ’59 Chevy Impala—and watch her, just watch from the sidelines. Get her to look straight into his eyes for a second, maybe longer.

  Peter Abbott came into
his mind for some reason, like a dull ache in the groin. A flash of something—back or forward? Mr. That’s Entertainment. A royal pain in the ass, that one. Dangerous. That knack he had of just holding on to something like an old shoe or a cookie jar—someone’s kidney stones, maybe. For Peter it was like grabbing on to a towrope at the bottom of a ski hill. Psychometrics.

  Peter Abbott. He was going right to the top of the list. His hit list.

  35

  . . . clear, cool, water

  Peter asked Anita to join him in the lounge and he took the chitchat in the direction of dowsing and Washington State, Seattle, and finally Gordon Quarendon.

  “Gordon? Don’t know a Gordon. Who’s that?” Her face was a blank page that had been crumpled up and unfolded.

  “He’s a dowser. He was . . . here for a while. He showed up about the same time you and Ron did.”

  “Jesus, Ron.” She brought her hand to her mouth—as if saying his name were a special occasion, something to be held back, rationed like water in the desert. “I can’t—” She shook her head, trying to rattle out the right words. “I have memories of remembering him—does that make any sense? Ron, that is.” Anita’s hand was near her mouth again. “But the authentic part of it’s fading real fast. I can’t tell them apart anymore—the clean ones from the—the muddy ones. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember this other one, Gordon.”

  The TV was on, of course: a car race of some sort—low-slung, fat-tired, logo-speckled machines chasing round and around. Commentators yelling over the revved engines now. Peter wondered why people put up with it—TVs in public places left on like indulged children. Unwatched, undisciplined. He got up and shut the thing off. “I still haven’t talked to Larry yet.”

  “Larry won’t remember anything. Poor Larry shouldn’t even be here; he should be in a detox center somewhere. They know it too, but he’s too valuable drunk. Not completely zonked—but, you know, sort of on maintenance.” There was a splash from the pool and they both turned to see Simon swim over to the ladder and climb out. He stood there at the edge of the pool for a second, shaking the water from his extended fingers, an absent tick like the sporadically galvanized muscles of a horse driving away a fly. “Blenheim’s good at turning a blind eye. In fact, I’ve seen him actually offer him a drink, just to keep him slightly buzzed; Larry really produces when he’s riding the hair of the dog, if you know what I mean—that’s what Susan told me anyway.”