A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  The man was reaching out to her, making hushing gestures. Simon could hear him thinking, My God, she’s going to start screaming “rape” any second now. He was oblivious to Simon—Simon and his many-colored dream coat. He was thinking he was to blame for sending his girl into a fit of hysterics (Simon heard the word in the man’s head: “hysterics”)—thinking this, and at the same time stuffing himself back into his pants, doing up his fly. Army issue. He ran a hand through his hair and with his head turned to one side raised his palm toward her in a gesture of appeasement, surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m real sorry, Laura. I don’t know what got into me. I’m—”

  Simon felt something then—something that seemed to focus his body, tune it in—a wave of vertigo, a turning of his brain inside his cranium it seemed like, and he was there—solid, as solid as he’d ever been, standing on the floor behind the couch now, in shadow. His hands and arms back to normal, part of the decor. Corporeal. He could smell the woman’s perfume or the guy’s aftershave—one or the other, or a hot cocktail of both—sweat in there too, female musk, rouge, mothballs, and furniture polish. Like his grandmother’s house, he realized, the pheromones of the forties. Shit, his own grandmother . . . he couldn’t imagine her getting ripe for anyone.

  The man was trying his best to calm the woman down. “Laura, it’s all right. I didn’t know you—”

  “Didn’t you see that! My God, take me home, Billy, Mary Mother of Jesus, it was your father! I swear he was standing right there—a man.” She was still on the floor in the corner; one of her shoes was caught in her skirt, the heel pointing into the darkest place Billy had ever imagined—white now, a glimpse of a simple V of white underwear. “He was, was all—bloody. On fire! Standing right there behind you when you was—” Her face clenched into a voice-eroding sob.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He wiped something from his face—what life was throwing at him.

  He turned toward the sound of footsteps clumping downstairs. His mother’s voice saying his name—right then he couldn’t imagine his name sounding any other way.

  “Go back to bed, Momma; everything’s fine.”

  His mother pushed open the door and stood there clasping her red satin kimono to her throat—the one with the dragons on it, the tea stains down the front thankfully lost in the new glare of hall light; the hair falling across her shoulders made her seem girlish and witch-haggard at the same time: “Thank God your father’s not here to see this. That’s all I can say.”

  There was a pallor to the room all of a sudden, a sadness. Simon was merely watching now, floating remotely invisible near the ceiling as the poor man deferred to one and then the other of the two women in the room with his head bowed, his hair like fine weeds around his ears. His iodined thumb an emblem—evidence. The guy was going off to war (Simon noticed the cap over on the sideboard, dutifully waiting for conquest). He just needed a fuck, a pledge of fealty, the promise of letters falling into the dark terror of combat—that’s all. He wondered whom he felt worse for: Larry being nixed in the bud or his poor slob of a father with the stain on his thumb.

  37

  . . . a stook and an order of fries

  Peter’s hand was on her breast. His lips were teasing the blunt point of her shoulder—tasting salt, and soap and a thin thread of a voice frayed from the sleeve of her consciousness.

  And then all of a sudden he was on the other side of the room, fully clothed, sitting in the dark, watching Pam sleep. Insomnia mixed with an unqualifiable dread. The memory of its gestation fresh in his mind: a minor argument over something incidental that had blossomed into sleep-killing agitation.

  Both streams clearly delineated: the moments of playful teasing leading up to kissing Pam’s shoulder, and the sleepless vigil in the easy chair. Two distinct events blurred in his memory only by the certainty that they were synchronous, overlapping. Again.

  The furniture looked different too—and not just because his perspective had suddenly changed. The elements were shuffled, some of them replaced but at the same time recognizable; the déjà vu syndrome was becoming contemptibly familiar.

  What’s happened now? He was overcome with an overwhelming conviction that he had forgotten to do something, that a crucial piece of personal business had not been attended to—all beyond the grasp of his consciousness, as slippery as a broken egg.

  What had changed? Who?

  The unfinished business—no, something else: an unfinished life. Larry was gone, or rather he knew it to be a fact that Larry had never been at Calliope. The weight of experience again, the burden of parallel memories—the time he’d spent with Larry, the incidental crossing of their paths all redrawn with the pencil line of Larry’s life erased. But it was there just the same, the impression of it—in the paper, the faint gray ghost of a pencil mark.

  Pam sat up in bed and said, “Simon’s gone.”

  “You mean Larry. Larry’s gone.”

  “No. Simon. I just got this flash of him getting on a plane.” She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Or maybe he’s still here and he’s just thinking about it. Really thinking about it. I don’t know. Who’s Larry?”

  “Shit.”

  They got dressed in the early-morning light and made a pot of coffee, conferring in whispers as if they were plotting an escape from a bugged room. Pam sat by the open window holding on to her cup with both hands, her shoulders hunched against a wind that had nothing to do with the movement of air.

  Peter pulled back the blinds and looked outside—at the dawn light falling across the courtyard and the pool off to the right, the lounge chairs lined up beside it catching the first rays of sun. The lush manicured flower beds beyond the pool were barely visible and at this hour the chairs looked new against the long shadows. Luminescent stage props brought in late last night as a convincing addition to the scene. Stagehands doing overtime. Insecurity was making him observant, at least. The inevitable second-guessing he was getting used to, but the sense of helplessness was something new.

  Basic questions stumbled into his mind: What was here before and what is gone now? What was missing before? What is here now? Peter couldn’t tell anymore. How many changes? Three people gone that he knew of: Ron Koch, Gordon Quarendon, and now Larry McEwan. But each loss brought with it an exponential increase in the level of uncertainty. Two to the power of the number of changes—combinations and permutations; old high school math telling him he had eight variations stored in his head, eight parallel worlds folded into the layers of his memory.

  Or I’m going crazy and I’m imagining everything. Phantom memories.

  He looked over at Pam sitting in the growing light. She had the cuffs of her shirt—his shirt—pulled down under her palms; she took a sip of her coffee and he could see her fingernails like little confetti half-moons lined up down the length of the cup—peas in a pod. “How do you spell ‘McDonald’s’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The restaurant. Big Macs—how do you spell it?”

  “M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D-S. How do you spell it?”

  “Like that, I guess,” Peter said, turning from the window. A real breeze had come up, rattling the palms, bringing in the scent of the sea. He remembered it both ways: as “M-C” and as “M-A-C” but he didn’t say anything.

  Again Pam had nothing but a vague recollection of the most recently disappeared of the Calliope psychics—Larry McEwan, the man who could project images onto film and videotape. But she did recall, in a surreal sort of way, the day Larry had bought his straw hat: “I get this impression of a tripod with a haystack stuck on top of it—one of those old-fashioned little haystacks they had before hay bales.”

  “Stooks. They’re called stooks,” Peter said, putting on his sandals. Her impressions still didn’t prove anything—she could be just reading his mind; corroborating his delusions out of psychic empathy.

  “Sanderson says that kind of stuff is more revealing than the logical stuff—when you’re tasking an unknown tar
get. The dream imagery.”

  Sanderson, Jeff Sanderson. Mike Blenheim’s replacement—a guy who used to do classified RV work for the military (where jargon like “tasking” had come from). Peter knew him and he didn’t—again the multi-memory-stream problem. This new version of things seemed more distinct than any of the others. It suddenly stood out from the rest like a column of boldface type. This one had gotten rid of Blenheim, and Thornquist had never been part of Calliope in this time line. For a wistful moment Peter missed the old guy; wondered what he was up to, whether he was still around at all.

  And now, according to Pam, Simon was leaving, or was planning on it—but of his own free will (Peter didn’t know what “free will” meant anymore).

  He remembered what had been nagging at him when the time line had suddenly forked—Simon had said something just yesterday, about his mother being sick; how he felt he should pay her a visit. In the other version, the old version—or was it the new one?—their conversation had been about a bad session he’d had with Susan—how he wanted Peter to speak to her about it. It was something about Hong Kong, the smell of the place, the way it smelled in 1906. How he was sick of “downer” targets.

  And now this—Larry suddenly out of the picture altogether.

  Peter poured himself another cup of coffee. “All these people imploding—I can’t believe it’s just sloppy work. They knew what to watch out for; it’s not as if—you know, like what happened to old Ron Koch—they know the rules of the game. It’s something else. It’s not just pilot error.”

  “We’re not supposed to be doing this—any of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just—unnatural. Like those astronauts, their bones dissolving from living in space.”

  “Why the others and not us? And what about Simon?”

  “He’s the kid, the youngest, maybe it’s true—only the good die young.” She snorted at the idea of it. Her own joke.

  “Yeah, but the oldest didn’t go first—Larry was the oldest. I think he was the oldest.”

  “I thought this other one you mentioned, Ron Koch. I thought he went first.”

  “He killed himself. He did it to himself by intentionally going back to a point during his own lifetime. The others, from what I can make of it, were never even born.”

  “But according to you, they did exist. You remember them—as adults. So maybe they did something to—you know, mess with themselves way back in history or something, take themselves out of the picture before they were born.”

  “If that’s the case, how would there be anything of them for me to remember?” He shook his head. “Jesus, it all keeps going round in circles, the logic of it. It’s totally illogical.” He had a vague recollection of having this same discussion with her once before; the words déjà vu came to mind again.

  The look she gave him then seemed odd, as if the signals developed between them were in a different dialect now—the words the same but the allusions slightly skewed. Maybe she was humoring him, playing along—it was unnerving how paranoid he was becoming. There was nothing solid to hold on to anymore.

  The half smile was familiar but the context was off. But wouldn’t that be the case anyway? The world was reinventing itself with every passing moment; even the world he used to know back before Calliope. He’d read somewhere that every time we remember something it’s changed by the circumstances of remembering.

  His memories—all his memories now were overlapped, pleated. He saw his life here at Calliope as a Chinese fan folded into itself, each facet of it made of the same stuff but, on closer scrutiny, altered, mutated into something else; the patterns in each fold of paper as distinct as fingerprints. That’s why the contradictions made sense. Nothing had been really changed, just revised—like a new telephone book sitting on the shelf right next to the old one.

  Pam was sitting in the chair near the window playing with the ends of her hair, pulling at them like a mime pretending to hoist a flag, her head to one side. The light from the window gave her front teeth a glint that accentuated her overbite. “It’s Simon, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Peter said from across the room.

  “Maybe Simon’s behind it all. And that’s why I keep seeing him running away.” She turned to look at him. “I don’t know—just a wild guess.” Her nose wrinkled and her voice dropped to a lower register. “The way he looks at the rest of us. We’re nothing to him. Have you noticed that? He treats people like furniture. It’s like Ron going back to that night before the big race or whatever it was and touching himself. I see Simon”—she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, holding it like a drag from a joint, then let it out through her words—“his fucking fingers into everything—”

  She sneered and hunched her shoulders and brought her hands up quickly, making a wiggly-fingers gesture, typing at the air. “—mucking with everything, getting his fingers dirty.” She started to sing, a breathy little whisper voice but right in tune. “. . . You know that song? It’s an old Beatles tune. ‘Piggies.’ I keep hearing it when I think of that guy.”

  Simon behind it all—Peter couldn’t help thinking it was too simple; the guy they liked the least around here responsible for all the chaos. Why would it have to be someone from Calliope? It could be anything or anyone from any place or even any time, for that matter. The only way he could affect the past would be through some sort of interference like Ron Koch inadvertently touching himself—going beyond a simple viewing session and physically transporting himself back into the past.

  “Give me a back rub,” Pam said, standing up, the tip of her tongue coming out of a suddenly radiant smile.

  The chemicals in her brain, Peter thought. She could switch moods with the flicker of an eyelid. She was taking off her top now, pulling her shirt up and over her head in one swift crossing of her arms.

  Her breasts like two Sabas on the horizon of her chest—volcanic. They looked different somehow. He put it down to sleeplessness, the new disruption. She pushed a pair of jeans and a paperback out of the way and jumped on the bed; she rolled onto her back with her feet in the air and slid off her shorts and underwear all in one go. New code again—a back rub meaning she wanted more than a back rub.

  He joined her on the bed and when he found his place next to her with her head finally nestled in the crook of his neck and his hand gently stroking her hair it occurred to him that maybe she was partly right. The mysterious figure that had showed up in some of his RV sessions—it could have been Simon. Showing up all over the place like the character in the Woody Allen film Zelig. Mucking with everything—like she said. It was the kind of crap he would really get off on.

  “Let’s see if we can find them, the ones that disappeared: see if they ever existed at all—do a session right here, together,” Pam said. This was later with the blinds drawn against the midday sun. The air conditioner was like a puffy pillow of noiselessness. There was a half-eaten bag of chips next to her bare flank, crumbs within a tongue’s reach.

  “I need something, a PL, an object. That’s the problem. There’s nothing of them here. Never has been, except in my head.”

  “You’ve got me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can take you back. I’ll be your psychometric link—sounds like a pop song, doesn’t it?” She started to sing: “I’ll be your—psychometric LINK—Touch me anyplace you THINK—will make me . . .”

  “How’s that gonna work?” he mumbled into her neck.

  “It’s like getting on the Net; just think about where you want to go and, you know—hit ‘search.’” She poked him in the ribs.

  “Stop that—I don’t know, it might screw things up—”

  “Come on. What have we got to lose?”

  “Our minds—how about that for starters?”

  Peter got up to urinate and returned with a glass of water. He climbed back into bed and took her hand in both of his and placed it on his chest. He closed his eyes and
let his breathing slow to the pace of hers. In less than a minute he found himself carried off on the swift current of her thoughts: past a flash of a pigeon picking at corn on a window ledge, then a tuba puffing through a Bavarian waltz. Voices talking over each other, words in other languages—Italian, German—swept past his inner ear like the coaches of a passing train.

  And then the sudden tumble into a place he’d never been before.

  . . . down into darkness, propelled by a colorless wind, a dry stream of massless air—

  “There, just like that.” The sound of a camera shutter.

  “One more. With your brother this time.” A little boy with his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. “Larry, take your hand away . . .” Another boy wearing a baseball cap came up to stand beside him; he wagged his head as he walked—he was playing at walking—then draped his arm across his brother’s shoulder, and stood there hanging off him, almost bringing them both down onto the beach sand. His shorts were twisted off center and his big, little-boy ears were pinked transparent by the sun . . .

  Fading, overexposed into searing white.

  . . . falling back, over the hump of conjecture: the Larry/no Larry knot of divergence . . . folding into folds. A song: Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”

  The thick scent of burning vegetation, smoke in the distance—yellow-gray. Hanging over horizon-bound fields green with overgrowth. A billboard at the side of the interstate: VISIT CAPE GIRARDEAU. HOMETOWN OF RUSH LIMBAUGH . . .

  The wind flailing at them, the two of them—Pam and Peter—and another one tumbling through the ether. Toward a dark room and the stink of dirty diapers, the sound of a baby crying. The unfledged brain of the baby counting the sobs of himself crying: a ticker-tape consciousness—a baby with the power to count out breaths and tiny pulmonary moments . . . One, two, three, four, five, and then nothing—a big zero.

  Peter came out of it with a sore throat and a sense that he had achieved something. “I was back somewhere, years back. Two different places. Two times.”