A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  The way he would do it was to plunge into one day, then pull up and away into the ether; then fall into the next—then the next. A rolling, bouncing tumble down and then up and out again. Yo-yoing in and out of the matrix—he was getting good at it—a delicate brush with a time and a place for just as long as it took to reconnoiter, get his bearings, then pull out again.

  Another day, then another—the zygote that one day would be Anita waiting for him, calling out to him. Here I am; here I am. As he moved further back, with each dip into the river, the voice got fainter and fainter. Now further back—a day or two. A week. He felt like a salmon swimming upstream to the spawning ground.

  Here we go . . .

  Mr. and Mrs. Spalding playing house: a bedroom, a cramped messy place. The floor was on a slant; peeling wallpaper covered a low attic ceiling. Simon could hear the murmur of slow, connubial, workmanlike sex. A huge man in a swaying bed, the blankets and a comforter piled on top of him. The whole mess moving with him, a turtle shell of shifting bedding. If there was a woman under all that, Simon couldn’t see her. He could hear her breathing, though, the moans—of pleasure, he assumed.

  What to do—he hadn’t thought beyond getting here—each conception unique in itself. He would wing it, play it by earplugged ear; draw back into the ether again, go back a few hours and see if he could change the course of things a bit earlier than this.

  The man suddenly stopped moving; his wife said something: a questioning groan. The bed creaked as the man pulled away from the woman and rolled over; the bedclothes moved with him and the woman was left exposed for an instant. Skin and bones. Next to him she looked insignificant—chicken bones beside a mound of mashed potatoes.

  The man moved out into the hall and turned on the bathroom light—he was naked; his gut like another creature clinging to the front of him. Another turtle. He was looking for something in the medicine cabinet over the sink. Simon floated up through the ceiling into the attic and down again, headfirst to get a closer look: Shit, he’s getting a condom—Jesus . . . The fat guy was tearing it open with his teeth, fumbling now, peering over his huge belly.

  The wrong night. Or maybe the woman was already pregnant and they didn’t know it yet. They had been right into it and all of a sudden the guy figures he should take precautions—weird. Simon couldn’t figure it out.

  Then he did something Simon had never seen before—heard about, yes: cock rings and all that: sex shop stuff—but never actually tried himself. The guy stretched out the condom as if he were a clown ready to make an animal out of a balloon and tied it round the base of his dick, like a tourniquet. Playing with himself now, pumping himself up. Shit, Simon thought. Like an accident in the Holland Tunnel—sperm gridlock. How the hell was he going to compete with that? This couldn’t be the right night.

  Back in the bedroom now: the man was climbing into bed, the springs making a plea for the poor wife as he buried her under a mass of flesh and bedclothes again. The same old drill, but with a new bit. A few minutes of something out of Steve Reich or Stockhausen: metal abrading metal; the sedulous rhythmic resolve of climbing stairs or chopping wood. Work without a payday.

  Anita deserves better than this, Simon thought. Larry’s conception had a modicum of Jimmy Stewart/Frank Capra schmaltz to it, at least.

  Up and out of there. Back a night or two—to the bedroom again. Both of them asleep this time, the clock on the side table ticking, the hands glaring at him—radium green: a quarter past three. Anita’s essence like a glowworm peeping the periphery.

  Something was drastically wrong. He had presumed; he had taken the data at face value. Stop analyzing, he told himself. Just focus on your target and go with the flow. Into the ether again, letting himself drift.

  . . . falling into bright sunlight outside an ice cream stand, a lunch counter—the sound of children squealing, shrieks and splashes, the familiar scent of chlorine. Jesus, I can’t get away from it . . . Anita’s mother looking into her handbag and taking out a change purse, poking at it with two fingers, her pinky like a dorsal fin, she was digging so deeply. Giving the young guy behind the counter the money—a boy about eighteen years old, wearing a little white cadet hat and apron; the apron smeared with chocolate syrup, cherry. He handed her an ice cream cone wrapped in a paper napkin—two scoops: one chocolate, the other vanilla.

  She stood there eating her cone, not moving away from the shade of the awning, and watched him as he tossed the ice cream scoop into a square stainless steel bowl. The young guy was leaning toward her over the counter now, smiling, jerking his head back and forth with the exuberance of his words, getting her to laugh right in the middle of a bite; it made her back away for a second as her hand came to her mouth in recovery. The quick laughter was a sign to him: You have plucked my heartstrings. He gave her a fresh napkin and she dabbed at a spot on her blouse just over her left breast.

  A little kid came running up to the counter and asked for something. The cold air from the cooler was visible as the young guy took out a Good Humor bar and an orange popsicle. He smiled at the woman through it all, looking down at her legs for a second, gauging.

  Anita’s mom hung around to finish her ice cream and the young man behind the counter went about his business, playing at being busy: shaking the French fryer, poking at the glistening hot dogs spinning on their chrome rollers. Chlorine and cooking fat in the air, in his clothes—a radio somewhere: Pat Boone singing “Love Letters in the Sand.” Kids squealing. A young mom telling her babies it was time to go.

  They were in darkness now, the warm transparent darkness of urban summer. Anita’s mother and the young man from the poolside lunch counter had reached the limit of their need to drive away from it all and were now parked at a spot at the end of a cinder-strewn road famous for its coded excuse for being a great place to view the city—the lights of Pittsburgh; the confluence of three rivers spangled with urban incandescence. A place to display one’s civic pride.

  Grape soda. Simon could smell it along with the lingering vapors of sun-warmed upholstery. There was a hint of recent cigarettes and the basso scent of deep fryer fat. As Simon came down on the scene—a somersault as his head dipped into the pool of sheet metal and fabric (the car roof metal, a plane of itch CAT-scanning his brain) he sensed that he had at last reached the source of the Anita River.

  The crickets were a high-end tintinnabulation, a background to the car radio lulling the couple into isolation. The dashboard lights made her thin legs showgirl pretty, Tinseltown smooth, Rockette erotic. The driver’s ice cream–chapped hand had just found Times Square. The Great White Way. His breathing hers now; hers his—conspiring.

  The cardboard pill box hat and apron were gone, the same for her blouse—flung into the backseat along with her purse. The chocolate ice cream stain had dried to a shadow of a sunspot on the tessellated pattern of pale pink hearts. The young man passed her a bottle of Southern Comfort and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he sat up and straightened his long body for a second as if he were getting ready to participate in something formal, athletic—the long jump.

  This is it, Simon thought. Ground zero. He knew it for sure. This night, this place, this man. Turtle-Belly wasn’t Anita’s daddy after all.

  He pulled up and away and then dove down into the scrub of trees that surrounded the rough cindered ground of the makeshift parking lot.

  It was time for the Annunciation, the Incarnation.

  He spun on the axis of his hips till he righted himself and brought his feet around to touch the ground. As he willed himself into being, he felt the now familiar heft of his own body falling into the remote ethereal shell of himself that had brought him here. Solid now, corporeal, integrated, in one swift moment of transition. Painless, like slipping on heavy boots.

  Simon could see the car more clearly now: a two-tone ’55 Dodge, it looked like. Fledgling fins sprouted from the taillights.

  He would just walk over there and introduce himself, as Roger Ebert, s
ay, or Brad Pitt—say his car had broken down or something . . .

  He took two steps around a small tree and it was like walking into a gale force wind.

  Simon felt a wave of vertigo twist his head around; it was as if an invisible set of arms had applied a half nelson. He fell back into pine needles and weeds and looked up to see the stars and the lights of the city blur and shimmy for an instant, the gibbous moon he only just now realized was rising off to his left seemed to flicker and dart around the sky till it locked into position over the black outline of a spruce tree farther down the hill.

  He got up and fell down again, making a noise this time—the branches of the bushes cracking under him; and the guy with Anita’s mom must have heard it. He turned away from her, interrupting whatever he was doing; Simon could hear him mumble something out the window into the night. With each fragment of a word Simon felt an echo ripple through the ether, as if each utterance were traveling down millions of corridors and flinging open countless doors of possibility . . .

  Ted had never been lucky enough to have this kind of opportunity before and he’d be damned if he was going to let this dame—this chance—slip by. A married one; her wedding ring had been right there in full view when she was eating her cone, which meant she was at least acquainted with going all the way . . . first base, second, third, being married wasn’t like that, he’d come to realize. Married couples just did it. All the time, whenever they wanted. It was more like just going up to bat. Three strikes, four balls—whatever: all just part of the game, the peanuts, the Crackerjack . . . that brick wall he’d run into with Connie at the drive-in. It had been a real date with Cokes and hamburgers and all; he’d even agreed to pick her up at her friend’s place so her parents wouldn’t catch on—all that legwork then to slam right into a fucking brick wall just as he was heading for home plate. And that time with Bill’s sister Wendy—her necking with him for like an hour with the lights out and then basically treating him like he was a piece of shit as soon as he tried to feel her up. This one was married—he had to keep telling himself that. Interested in him only for one thing—which was just fine by him. Her husband was reluctant to do his marital duty for some reason. That wasn’t any of his business of course; she was an adult. Twenty-five, maybe older than that, he figured. Twenty-eight. Anyway, she could do whatever she liked. Skinny as all hell but shit—as his older brother liked to say: turn ’em upside down they all look the same. Not that he had actually ever seen a woman upside down, except in a magazine his brother kept in his room behind the dresser.

  He took out his Luckies as soon as he shut the car off and tapped one out of the pack the way he’d been practicing. She took the first drag as if she were coming up for air and did that thing where you exhale and suck the smoke up into your nose at the same time . . . just as the Everly Brothers came on: “Bye Bye Love,” which was his favorite right then, and it was all like a movie—the music and this real woman in his dad’s car with him up here looking out over Pittsburgh with the twinkly lights and all, which was supposed to be as good as Spanish fly—at least according to his brother. Or an aspirin in a bottle of Coke. He should have thought of that.

  Simon had retreated into the ether, but he felt compelled to go back. Something had thrown him off but he wasn’t going to give up. He was willing to give it one more shot, try a different tack . . .

  The brassiere under the young man’s fingers: a tactile recapitulation of the shape of his car (Simon could read this from some deeper structure of Ted’s understanding). This was the good life: the car, the breasts—the solid hard fact of progress; the elements of the ritual stylistically harmonized. Like the city down below, the steel mill stacks, the lights of them burning all through the night. Opportunity. Grab it while you can.

  The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold . . . Where did that come from? A poem Simon had learned in school, a snatch of it. Out of the blue—memory a funny thing, capricious.

  What to do now? This was the moment—he was sure of it. The bold move, the offensive, for a change. Anita the issue here—the outcome, so to speak, of this indiscretion on her mother’s part. And who could blame her? What with the prospect of going home to Mr. Creosote.

  He felt himself materialize off to the left of the car, in shadow beside a clump of bushes. The sudden weight of himself, the uneven ground, the feel of gravel under his feet. He took a deep breath: the sweet scent of weeds and a hint of burning coal. The air heavy with humidity. The sudden touching down, the compression of his vertebrae. The sound gone all of a sudden—then he remembered he had brought something else over here along with his clothes—his materialized ears were stuffed with earplugs; he took them out and heard the crickets again, the thin whine of radio music from the car radio.

  He had to figure it out: what to do. Now that he was committed to this time and place.

  Act.

  He suddenly felt the heft of consequence turning every move of his body into the first pedal of a bike in high gear. Up the hill of history; against the current. More than that—he was changing the flow. Everyone who would ever come into contact with Anita, had come into contact with her—their lives would be edited, rearranged, rechoreographed.

  Do it now.

  Simon came out from behind the bushes and jumped onto the hood of the car. The metal buckled. He lost his balance and his arms came forward, slapping the roof as he broke his fall. The woman screamed, then the guy said, “What the fuck?” his voice breaking into a prepubescent yelp. The woman stopped to take a breath, then started up again—a full-throttled mezzo bellow, a monster movie belt-of-a-scream—pulling clothing up to her chest as she gazed through the windshield at the glowing figure of Simon. His body was strobing now as he struggled to maintain corporeality; he faded into nothing and backed into the storming ether.

  As he tacked up and out of there the eddies and currents of the distorted time line thrashed at his limbs, threatening to tear him apart. The fold in the fabric of things was permanently pressed: Anita was gone for good—I have done it again, he said to himself. That simple: pre-coitus interruptus.

  (The universe was dickering with itself, wrangling, recalibrating, deciding—where to take the irritant out of the scheme of things—in a totting up of accounts that was just on the edge of reshuffling the deck in Anita’s favor—whether to let it be, the reconfigured flow looping back and forth between Now and Then, Past and Future. It was an intricate contortion of time and place. Some would call it an Act of God, or Fate, or History, Karma—there are many names for the calisthenics of the unfolding . . .)

  40

  Nat’s duet with Natalie

  “We’re moving you all out of here—I’m sorry.” Jane looked tired, burdened with more than the laptop she carried over her shoulder. “It’s not my decision; head office wants us to streamline things a little.”

  The meeting had been called less than an hour ago, and most of the technicians and office staff filling the chairs in the lounge area and spilling out onto the patio seemed eager to return to what they had been doing. The only psychic operatives at the meeting were Peter and Pam, and someone he now realized was another element unique to this time line: Colin Ralston, a heavyset, middle-aged ex-fireman from Denver. No one else—just the three of them. There was a place for Simon in Calliope’s lineup but he’d resigned. In this stream of things he’d picked up and left just as suddenly as he had in the last one.

  “We’re moving you all to a location just outside Iowa City,” she said, glancing down at a sheet of paper. “Our target date is about two weeks from now, so, if I were you I would finish up what’s on your desk and start packing.” There were groans from a few of the techies standing beside the coffee machines at the back—some people just turned away and started out of the room. “Any questions, talk to Sanderson. He’s coordinating it all.” Jane presented them with something close to a smile: “It’s not that bad; we’re taking over the facilities
of a prep school. Nice old campus, lots of trees.”

  Peter was walking along the beach with his shirt off enjoying the sunshine and the fresh breeze coming in off the ocean, trying to make the best of his last few weeks in St. Martin, and the next instant, he was on a dirt driveway lined with mature maples. In a place smelling of wet leaves and damp car exhaust now—he felt the cold slap of a north wind on his face. His legs gave out for a second as if he’d been playing Whirling Dervish and he ended up sprawled in a puddle.

  No more palm trees and conch chowder. He was wearing an overcoat and a pair of leather gloves . . . recognizable of course, gloves he’d bought only yesterday at a mall about six blocks away.

  My God. Not again, not so soon. Another one. Pam. His Pam, thank God, was with him here—near Iowa City, a few miles out of town. He could see her about ten paces ahead of him farther along the drive with Linda, one of the technicians. She had turned around and was running back to see what had happened, calling his name.

  It was Anita this time. Who else could it be? No one else left but him and Pam, the new guy, Colin Ralston. And Simon of course, but he was immune to it. The disease never attacks itself.

  And then the weight of all the conflicting memories and memorials to all the people he had known and lost since joining Calliope began to push at the boundaries of his cranium—thirty-two. His actor’s memory again; he knew all the parts of every version of the script.

  Thirty-two alternate paths his life had taken since Ron Koch had done himself in. All blurring into a noisy gray mishmash of images and voices and conflicting reminiscences. No more Anita. But Pam was there spilling over the boundaries of all of them—like a darting hummingbird, the interfering wave forms of who she was in his mind—overlapping, fan-folded, a time-lapse blur of flapping wings solid and ephemeral all at once.

  She had a little scar just above her eyebrow he noticed then as she bent down to help him up. From her half-open mouth her breath rose in the cool air like a flame. She pushed a curtain of hair behind an ear; her brow was wrinkled with concern as her index finger came to her lips—then the sound of the nail: snagged; caught in the machine of her anxiety.