A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “So this Quarendon, the dowser—nothing rings a bell, huh?”

  “I wish I could help you, Peter. I’m drawing a blank. Sorry. I might have met him—did he go home or something? I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t like it here unless, you know, him being from Seattle.” She huffed a smile and got up out of the chair, suddenly wanting to be out of the smoke-free room. “Maybe the sun got a bit too much for him.”

  Simon Hayward was on the diving board again, posed, motionless at the end of it; his right hand was out in front of him, palm down, the way one would test the heat rising from a barbecue grill. His hand came up and he did something Peter couldn’t see—up to his chest for an instant. It was like a kiss, it seemed to Peter; the touch a ritual gesture of some kind. Simon stood there a while longer, then quickly climbed down from the board as if he’d heard someone call his name.

  Simon was posing himself two questions—in the last instant before touching the water. Number (1): Is this my first dive (into water) since 1986—since my BONK-ON-THE-HEAD-ENDS-DIVER’S-CAREER day? And Number (2): What am I going to do about Peter fucking Abbott?

  One of the questions, at least, was being answered. He saw it as a breakthrough because the fear of the dive itself had been transformed into the posed question, which in turn distracted him from the invisible barrier he had constructed for himself. As the tips of his fingers broke through the surface, the transition from air to water was like the passing of a second, or a second hand on a watch marching one tick clockwise—the wisdom of clocks. He was struck once more by the ineffable mystery of it—time passing. Time itself a container that held nothing, the nothing it held boundless. Like the Gnostic nostrum about God being an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, or infinite. Both.

  He climbed out of the pool, cool and warm at once as the sun and breeze hit him; he dripped his way to the diving board again, thinking, One more. A memory of being here before, walking this small journey with the sunlight through the palms precisely at this angle. Did I actually do this before? Am I remembering it from the day Gordon showed me the dowsing trick? Or am I imagining it? Did I go swimming on that version of the day? Or the other version of it—the one without him?

  His memory was everything, he had to remember that. And every time he changed something in the past it only added to, rather than reduced, his store of memories. Eliminating someone or changing something only congested the traffic of his thoughts. Fucking rush hour all day long now—in his head, memories battling memories; events laminated to parallel events.

  Another dive—go on, do it again, just to be sure. Like checking the door of his room again, the stove, touching the elements, just to be sure they were off, heading for the door but circling back to check again—absently. Touching his medal now, to prove something, to disprove the change of things, the shifting. My rod and my staff shall comfort me . . .

  He had found what he had been looking for in Jane’s office, Jane’s drawers: the dates, and times, and places—for all the other psychics but one. This was the question that had led him to the pool—the new blockage he was playing off against an old one.

  Peter fucking Abbott had been adopted. The birth date in his file was approximate: right there next to it—“(approx.).” The place, even less precise, had been surmised, conjectured—his real father and mother had been like gypsies: no fixed address. The top of his hit list—he would have to slide him down a few notches. He would be bumped from the next flight, at least.

  This was the problem that posed the second question—what the fuck was he going to do now? Where was he going to get the coordinates? He’d tried the drifting Zen approach into the past but he’d slammed into a brick wall, a tornado of turbulence—like what had happened with Gordon Quarendon. He’d come out of his casual glide through the ether with a brain-wringing headache and a palsied tremor in his left hand. It was as if he’d done a belly flop from the ten-meter tower. A quart of water and over-the-counter painkillers had taken the edge off it—the headache at least. The shakes had lasted another hour. Never again, he told himself. Not without a compass.

  Maybe he was creating the turbulence, causing something like the greenhouse effect—too many changes to the ethereal climate. Or he was chopping at the branches of his own family tree. Shit, he couldn’t see himself related to this guy, Abbott—a common second cousin twice removed or some such shit—the inverted family tree. The root system connecting everyone. It had been like diving into a tidal wave. No. It had to do with coordinates. Spotting again—orienting himself, so he could make a clean, vertical plunge into the past.

  So here he was at the end of a real diving board letting his muscle memory refresh itself—like riding a bicycle, or so the cliché went. Checking for permanent brain damage. Something of a joke really—since he’d never learned to ride a bicycle. A gap in his education, a hole in his childhood. After his famous bout of convulsions his mother had come to believe that anything could trigger a relapse, that her little Simon was vulnerable to every possible calamity—the loss of training wheels part of an absolute equation for disaster.

  An embarrassment later on of course, what with the Vancouver bike thing, like a religion to some—all his friends into mountain bikes there for a while, and all the bike shit that went with it—the spandex, the water bottles, the helmets—every weekend the ritual trek up Seymour or out to Whistler. He’d slipped by that one feigning poverty, a twisted ankle, whatever.

  He climbed up onto the board and walked out to the edge, out over the breeze-dappled water—little pseudo suns glinting off each peak, cyanosis blue. The heat of the real one was a thermal push on the top of his head. He held his hand out like a metal detector feeling his way through the puzzle of memories—refreshing them. Muscle memory. Testing. Touching St. Christopher: every journey begins with a step, a leap.

  He suddenly realized the second question had been answered; but in some arcane dynamic of anxiety conservation, the wall between him and the water had returned. Touch the medal. Again. Again—he still couldn’t bring himself to jump. Once was enough. For now.

  Maps. Gordon’s trick with the maps: the inkling of an insight. Space maps and Time maps. The solution calling out to him from his own fucking amazing brain, hanging with the ends of his toes on the edge of the diving board.

  36

  . . . here’s one for the history books (click)

  Bill McEwan wasn’t good at this, he never had been: carving the bird. Slicing meat was something he had always found to be too fussy a job—being left-handed, never quite sure which hand should hold the carving knife—and with an audience it was even worse. The word “carve” threw him off too; it being a word used in his own profession, carpentry. Wood was something he understood—the limits of it, the give-and-take, the moods it got into sometimes, how it changed with the weather—different kinds of wood each with a personality of its own. Basswood with its generosity of texture, oak like an old bartender he once knew: hard but predictable. Handling poultry, red meat—any kind of food really—was like dealing with a miserable child.

  For this special occasion his mother had decided on a chicken; she’d driven all the way out to the country for it, to her cousin’s place out near Lockport. “Right off the farm,” she said. “Farm-fresh. Hand-plucked.” White hairs like a two-day-old beard still showing on the goose-bumped wings.

  As he stood up and removed his jacket his mother and the woman he was convinced one day would be his wife stopped speaking; they turned their eyes on him with an expectancy he sensed was being hoisted, rather than allowed to rise of its own free will.

  His mother saw him now as his long-dead father, “Stepping into his shoes” was how she put it. She would open her eyes wide with inspiration and say it as if she were the mint and was coining the phrase then and there. This never made sense to Billy; he would never be allowed to step into his father’s shoes. The shoes were right where he’d left them the night he died—in the front closet a
long with his overcoat.

  On special occasions like this one, his mother insisted on setting a place for his father at the table, even now with Laura here—this occasion he wanted to be less than special, a dinner as ordinary as any other, at least as ordinary as a meal in someone else’s house. As they came to the table Bill had explained that no one else was really coming to dinner; but his mother stepped over his words saying, “Of course he is! He’s always with us, Billy. I believe that, don’t you, Laura? Do you have any deceased loved ones? They’re here with us now too—I believe that! Standing right there watching us have this wonderful bird.”

  He’s watching over us, Billy; he’s right beside me now. I can feel him. His mother’s constant refrain—as if their lives were a movie serial, like The Perils of Pauline, episode after episode just for his father, day after day, cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger.

  So Bill McEwan was impatient with the overcooked bird—the flesh was like bundled string; it turned the knife into a plow. The two-tined fork felt something like a bottomless bailing bucket—a joke of a tool, one of God’s practical jokes. And he ended up catching the end of his thumb as the blade slipped on the bird’s rib cage. His mother was too quick with the first-aid kit and it embarrassed him as he stood there sucking on his thumb, telling his new girlfriend he did this sort of thing all the time, what with saws and chisels and the like down at the shop: “Blood and sawdust go hand in hand,” he heard himself saying as his mother appeared with the iodine and the Elastoplast.

  Later, after the stringy bird and overcooked beans—the inveterate regimen of apple pie or pumpkin pie or “a bit of both” (à la mode or not à la mode)—were all cleared away, his mother brought out the camera.

  “Let’s go out and get a picture before we lose the light.” She handed it to him with the same look she had used with the chicken. Your dad would be proud of you, Billy. If God had let him live long enough to really see you here now, in your uniform going off to war. Pearl Harbor a good thing after all—part of God’s big plan—for my Billy at least. And Roosevelt of course. What am I saying—he knows that already, doesn’t he?—how good you look in your uniform.

  The little box camera was like a brick in his hand—his dad’s camera. A Kodak box camera with the little flip-up cover on the viewfinder—you had to hold it at waist height and line up the tiny postage-stamp miniature of what was going to be in the picture: his mother and his new girlfriend here under the maple tree, the foliage: “Never again like this, not in a dog’s age—come on, Billy,” his mother saying as she’d pushed past him. Laura was smiling at him over her shoulder as she followed her out to the yard—in her footsteps.

  Here’s my mother with the mother of my children, he said to himself. Can it be so bad to want to think about making love to a girl with your mom right there beside her?

  He backed up and his foot bumped against the bottom step of the back porch; he lost his balance and fell back. As he moved to break his fall, the camera came loose, clattering onto the concrete steps. (His father had sworn by concrete; he’d never trusted wood.) A chip of Bakelite came away from the corner, leaving a jagged hole about the size of a lima bean. He thought of the film right away, the light getting in and spoiling the roll. He covered the hole with the heel of his thumb and slowly got to his feet.

  His mother and Laura stayed standing there under the tree, posed, stilled by all the commotion. A frame of difference, though: each of them with a right hand halfway to the heart now. The next instant the setting sun broke through the clouds and hit the tree with sudden, incandescent color that pushed the two women into the background—like the cellophane around a dozen roses.

  “You okay, Billy?” his mother said, the breeze through the golden leaves giving her voice a childish soprano edge—a flash in his head then, of Laura turning into his mother one day, or there already in the rough—like a carving waiting, buried in the block of wood. He studied the details for a moment: Laura’s neat little pale blue hat with the one feather, her white gloves clutching the bag; the dress with the kind of shoulders he liked—Bette Davis shoulders. His mother was standing there just like her, both of them with a right hand halfway to the mouth now.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. Hold on. Stay where y’are. Stay just like that.” He should tell her about the camera, the hole in it. But not now. He peeled the institutional flesh-tone bandage off his thumb and quickly applied it to the broken corner. “Now smile.” He looked up for a second; they were already smiling, each of them frozen in a smile. The smile we all think of as the best possible smile—the one that will outlast us.

  Later in the parlor, with the radio off and the Victrola playing now: the Andrews Sisters—one voice it seemed like; split off like white light into a rainbow—quietly singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

  “I’m going off to war, Laura. It’s not just, you know, a visit to the Adirondacks, for God’s sake, I might never come back.” His mother had finally gone to bed—Jack Benny over with, and then The Chase and Sanborn Hour, Charlie McCarthy saying things no real person, no polite person would ever say. Like Billy’s thoughts about why he’d wanted the program over with. His hand was on Laura’s knee, his little finger stretching; even through the wool of her skirt he could feel the band of her stocking inches farther along. The nub of the garter like a benchmark, a raised knot in a plank. “I love you, Laura.” He heard a peeved whine in his voice that wasn’t supposed to be there—a little boy asking for candy.

  She had let him kiss her (he’d put his jacket back on, and she wondered if that had anything to do with it: the man in the uniform), a lingering kiss that had forced her back onto the collection of small dense cushions in the corner of the settee. Black satin with gold tassels: Niagara Falls, Coney Island, Lake Placid—others with the names of places she had never heard of. She was aware of the lump against her back more than the kiss, but he did not know that. She was breathing now—deeply—as a way of coping. She thought to herself that in the movies they never said, “Get off me, my back hurts”—Katharine Hepburn might, but only in a screwball comedy. Ginger Rogers would put up with it—for the sake of the moment. As part of the dance. There was a phony “Sen Sen” taste to his kiss; a drugstore taste. Listerine. She’d expected something else—sandalwood or cedar. Turpentine.

  She looked down at the hand on her thigh, at the brown-stained thumb, and in the faint glow of the hall light it looked like blood, or tree sap, something vital, and for a moment she got the feeling it was too late for her; the giving of herself to him history now, a runaway car already tumbling with its axle and gas tank showing, beyond the edge of a cliff.

  October 1942. Batavia, New York—halfway between Buffalo and Rochester. Where Larry had come into his own—as a human being. Well, not quite human yet—a sperm and an egg slamming up against each other, soul mates making the beast with two backs and one tail. Big Momma Ovum like Aunt Jemima, it seemed to Simon, with a Jabba the Hut kind of attitude—all these flailing little wiggly-tailed flunky sperm dudes peacock strutting and fighting to get into her pants. His job was to get to the dance floor and tap them all on the shoulder, cut in on them sort of, before “Stairway to Heaven” starts up: the slow song that got their hands roaming. Play chaperone at the junior prom.

  The egg was monogamous at least. He’d read somewhere, or seen something on TV about how the egg, once she had given herself to the leader of the pack, the outer membrane of the cell turned into armor plate—some chemical response turned her skin into a chastity-belt carapace. Simon kept seeing the scene from the Batman movie where the guy’s nifty car did the same trick. Batman/Bruce Wayne was probably a cross-dresser, now that he thought about it. His true identity something else entirely. Gender confusion: where all the angst was really coming from. Anyway . . .

  Larry’s birth date was July 14, 1943, so he’d aimed for somewhere close to nine months earlier than that. With Larry, thank God, he had a relatively precise target, but there was still a fudge factor to de
al with; so it had taken a few RV dives till he narrowed it down to one specific pivotal incident—the day before Larry’s dad was heading off to defend his country . . .

  There now; here now: around October 1942.

  Jesus, they were at it already. Larry’s soon-to-be dad was on top of her. No. The guy’s pants were still on. He was busy, though, pawing at her, trying to clear a path to the promised land.

  Okay. Bingo, touch down. Corporeal Manifestation in the Past. CM in the P. In the flesh. Simon grabbed the guy by the back of his jacket collar and pulled. He could feel the stubble of his close-cropped military-issue buzz cut on the back of his knuckles.

  The woman screamed and he noticed something odd—his own skin was glowing like footage from an infrared camera—multihued, solarized like sixties acid-trip film sequences, like the stuff in 2001 where “Dave” is cruising down toward Jupiter. Shit, it must be the light in here, he thought; his hand all of a sudden passing through the guy’s jacket collar and his grip coming to nothing as if he were holding on to Jell-O. The young woman scuttled off the couch and onto the floor like a retreating crab from a turned-over rock—away from both of them. Panting in barking screams, as she levered herself backwards along the floor into the corner. White thighs showing above the tops of her stockings. A garter belt.

  Shit. Corporeal. Sort of, Simon thought. Halfway there anyway.