A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  “You remember what I said about all those people disappearing? The Calliope people?” he said, taking off his coat, hanging it on the hook behind the door. They were sharing an apartment in this latest version of things.

  “The sort of reverse amnesia?”

  “Did I say that? ‘Reverse amnesia’?”

  She nodded over her coffee cup and swallowed quickly. “When we were in that luggage shop near the place where they gave you the bad haircut.”

  He did remember that conversation now, along with the one in his apartment in St. Martin. And another parallel conversation where he had discussed it with Pam and Gordon, after Larry had disappeared. Another version with Anita and Larry after Gordon had vanished—he stopped it right there. “Well, it’s happened again,” he said, getting a cup for himself. “Her name’s Anita. Anita Spalding. And I know exactly what you’re going to say.”

  They approached Jane and the head of the lab, Sanderson, and arranged to meet the next day in Jane’s small office, and after fumbling with chairs brought in from the lounge down the hall and stepping over file boxes and stacks of books till everyone found a place to settle, Peter told them the whole story: about what he remembered—about all these people the whole universe had chosen to forget. The subtle changes he had noticed: the nuances of speech patterns; the world in general altered in ways he couldn’t define.

  And specific things: “I have these very early memories from, say, back when I was eight or nine of this scandal in the White House. Nixon’s White House. Something to do with a break-in; some ex-CIA guys were involved. He ended up being impeached. Does that ring any bells with you people at all?”

  Jane said nothing for a while; she avoided his eyes and made a few notes on her pad. Occasionally raising her hand to slow him down. He wanted to ask her about Thornquist—whether she was missing him as much as he was—but changed his mind. Jane looked older today; her eyes looked tired. The cafeteria rumor mill was hinting at a possible management shake-up.

  Throughout it all, Sanderson played the impartial man of science. Every now and then he would pause to key something into his laptop. He approached the story as if Peter were a patient presenting him with a peculiar set of symptoms.

  In general Peter’s revelations were met with polite skepticism—sometimes nervous silence; Jane thought it was an interesting notion that someone could actually go back and interfere with the past—remote viewing expertise hadn’t progressed that far yet. Reliable observation was the best they could hope for, if that—but yes, it was an interesting idea. One of the theory people would get a memo about it.

  “We have no records of them ever being here.” She checked her notes. “This Gordon Quarendon, or a Larry McEwan, Anita Spalding—none of them.”

  “It could be a side effect of RV exposure to the ether,” Sanderson said, crossing his legs. “More artifice than artifact, if you know what I mean—you’re projecting.”

  “Like phantom limb pain?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Someone once told me that’s what it was like—these delusions I have.”

  “‘Delusions.’ Well, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s to be expected to some degree; we’ve all been under a great deal of pressure lately. You’re projecting, that’s all.”

  Sanderson got up to leave, as if that were enough: his few words, a spell that could drive out demons. “Why don’t you—get some rest, take a few days off? Your sessions could be rescheduled for now, or assigned to someone else?” He looked over at Jane with a questioning raise of the eyebrows. She nodded and wrote something down.

  Pam spoke up then: “Why don’t you tell them, Peter?”

  They all turned to look at her. She reached over for Peter’s hand and knew right away that he didn’t have the energy for it; so she carried on: “We think it’s Simon.”

  “Simon Hayward?”

  Pam nodded. “I saw him do it.”

  What do you mean, you ‘saw him do it’? Do what?”

  “I watched him. I was”—she wondered how much she should tell them: the unauthorized session thing being such a taboo at Calliope—“dreaming, I guess. I ended up in this place where he was killing a little baby. A little boy. And I know it was Gordon Quarendon. I just saw his name spelled out right in front of me—like one of those simple locator targets Linda gives us all the time—the sound of the name in my head. Anyway—he was actually killing the baby with a pillow—”

  Jane blinked a few times and said, “I think you two are spending way too much time together.”

  This version of Calliope felt more like a down-at-the heels sanitarium than a college campus. The climate had something to do with it, Peter figured—the incessant rain for the past few weeks, the dour gray sky. The linoleum floors of the hallways, the ingrained odor of urine drenched in disinfectant. The grimy halo around all the doorknobs.

  Pam spent the next day looking for Simon Hayward—three hour-long remote viewing sessions behind the locked door of their quarters. She used her trolling technique. “Like channel surfing,” she said, “only more strenuous.” During the last one, Peter had to hold her down to keep her from rolling off the bed.

  “All I got was this grainy old sixties stuff—old movies or something. Barbie doll chicks wearing pastel minidresses. Guys with those tab collar shirts and greasy-looking suits. Hokey music. Bad acting.” Pam was in the shower talking over the sound of the spray.

  Peter was shaving: “Maybe he’s working for a movie company in Hollywood. Or a video store.”

  “Maybe he’s just watching a lot of bad TV.”

  “Give it a break; try again tomorrow.”

  He tried to play down how useless he felt—without a psychometric link there was nothing he could do to help her. Simon had left nothing behind; not even a scrap of paper, never mind a forwarding address.

  Pam and Peter went for a long walk around the grounds of the college, through ankle-high drifts of fallen leaves; the clouds were layered like bunched denim on the horizon and the thin light of evening made them pensive.

  “I’m going to give you my book, just in case.”

  “What book?”

  “The one I—borrowed from that library in New York—the Parapsychology Institute, or whatever it’s called. I’m going to let you have it. In case I go first and you can use it as a P-link—to come find me.”

  He didn’t bother trying to explain how it wouldn’t help—that if she disappeared everything else she had ever come into contact with would be shuffled back into the deck—dealt out somewhere else. The book would end up back where it belonged probably—on the shelf in the Archives of the American Society for Psychical Research. Undisturbed since the turn of the century. He just took her hand and pulled her close to him; he removed his gloves, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her on the forehead. Her hands found their way under his coat and she pressed her face against his warm chest.

  “What makes you think you’re at the top of his list?” Peter said after a moment. “I could be the next to go. Or maybe he’s had enough for now, forever—who knows.”

  “’Cause I do. The guy’s evil.”

  “It’s evil,” Peter said in a Cockney accent.

  “What?” She raised her head to look at his face.

  “It’s a line from a film. English: a Terry what’s-his-name picture, one of the Pythons—called Time Bandits—remember that one?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  They walked on, around what used to be the football field, then across the quadrangle to the old library steps. They sat on the low stone wall and watched a gust of wind herd the leaves over the paving stones.

  “Don’t forget me, okay?” Pam said looking straight ahead.

  “I wish I could.”

  She frowned at him.

  “If you do go first, I don’t want it to be like the others. I’d rather cut my head off—” He stood up and absently picked a scrap of newspaper from a bush and sent it flying off with the leaves. “I don’t kn
ow which is worse—losing you and remembering it, or forgetting you altogether.”

  “Don’t forget me, Peter. You’re all I’ve got! If you forget me, goddam it, I don’t exist.”

  “Why do you keep insisting you’ll be the first to go?”

  Pam pulled her coat tighter and crossed her arms. “Because.” She turned away from him. “I see you there all the time, you know? A—a continuous you. Past, present, and future. But a future that comes to a sort of cliff or something—”

  “Stop it.”

  “So that means I go first, doesn’t it? There’s no gap, no chunk of time when you’re not there, so—”

  “Stop it.”

  41

  Man finds gold; gold finds man.

  For a while when Simon was about twelve or thirteen he had a paper route. He would get up early and head out on his bike through the long-shadowed, dew-laden air, along streets laundered of traffic to doorsteps and front porches he came to know like the shape of his own shoes. The bicycle his uncle had given him—an old fat-tired gearless clunker with a small front wheel to accommodate a huge wrought-iron carrier so massive and sturdy it must have been designed for newspapers or cardboard boxes full of groceries. It was from a past when men still did the work of boys.

  The start of the route was always the most harrowing from a bike-riding point of view, the weight of his full load of papers turning the front wheel into a thing with a reptilian mind of its own; a willful, animated creature bent on pulling the bike off course—sometimes pulling him off the bike altogether.

  Finding his way through the ether was like that now: a struggle against the massive pull of something brazen and unruly. It was like holding the handlebars of the heavens in his hands—a dowsing rod of cosmic proportions. In the midst of a session he could sometimes sense that pushing too hard in the direction he wanted to go would lead to something close to falling off his bike—but much more catastrophic. Much more final, fatal. Like falling against a sheet of plate glass.

  He thought about the list of rules Jane had handed out the day Ron Koch had disappeared, and it occurred to him that the rules that count aren’t made, they just are: they are a part of how the universe operates. The rule about getting close to your own ancestors; the one about not mucking with your own life line; how the universe will eat you up and spit you out if you try anything that could alter your own destiny. He felt sometimes, in his dives through the ether, how close he had come to brushing up against something rigid and abrasive. Unforgiving. Like hands at his throat.

  “Touching down”—that’s how he thought of it. For Simon a corporeal manifestation in the past was a tactile experience more than anything else: the cold rain, or warm air on the skin, the heft of himself pressing down on his shoes.

  But he’d been nowhere near the tangle of roots that connected him to his own past—at least that was what he had presumed. His targets had all been earlier than his own conception date so there had been no chance of imploding like Ron Koch; but not so much earlier that he would get caught in the web of his own heritage—uncles and great-uncles, cousins twice removed, third cousins of ex-husbands of an aunt’s sister-in-law cropping up in the middle of a session parsecs away from his own life line.

  He had tinkered with the past—toyed with it, massaged it. He liked to see it as fine-tuning the universe, but he realized now how complex a piece of machinery it was—how inscrutable. The whole number that was greater than the sum of its parts was beyond his comprehension.

  Gordon, Larry, and now Anita—everything about them forgotten—unremembered, rather than forgotten. Deconstructed. But at the same time, everything about himself, the world he had grown up with, was somehow being altered as well. Sometimes he would come out of what he considered a simple RV session and feel so drained and enervated by the experience that he could barely muster the energy to take out his earplugs. He would spend a whole day in a chair staring at the TV. He would wake up some mornings convinced that his sense of humor was dying—there were no clear reference points anymore. A good joke needed something to push against.

  There were no Nike shoes in this version of things, no Swatch watches. East Germany was still struggling along; Hewlett Packard was known as Packard Hewlett. Heaven’s Gate had been a huge hit at the box office.

  What really bothered him was that the newest version of things he had constructed all seemed natural and familiar—part of another overlapping stream of consciousness that had sluiced through his mind from the day he was born. He could ride a bike—he had learned to do it as a very small child. A fact. A truth. Once you learn how you never forget. But another part of him couldn’t, never had—had always been embarrassed that he couldn’t.

  He took a plane to Albuquerque, New Mexico, rented a Jeep Cherokee and at a hardware store on the way out of town bought a small shovel and a hatchet. All the way down I-25 to Las Cruces a voice inside his head—insistent, hectoring—his own voice from the cautious, rational side of his brain, kept pushing its way to the surface of his thoughts: “. . . the universe won’t put up with shit like this. You start fucking with the past, it will crush you. It will fold you up into this, this . . . packet of nothingness so fast, so tight, everything about you . . . gone, forgotten. Like you were never born. Let go of it, accept the world you’ve made for yourself and live with it.”

  He passed an exit for a place called Truth or Consequences and he wondered whether he was making it all up as he went along now. One nightmare piled on top of another. “It will crush you, my friend, eliminate the irritant. And that is you—a fucking grain of sand up its ass.”

  The three bags of gold were under the rubble at the base of the old mission wall—right where he’d expected them to be. (There were still some constants in the universe, thank God. Some kind of cosmic gold standard at work maybe.) Treasure trove. The small leather sacks were heavier than he’d imagined anything that size could be. The leather was brittle, like old cardboard. One of them tore open as he placed it in the back of the Jeep. A grain of sand up its ass—the voice again. Simon gathered up the spilled nuggets and stashed them in the plastic bag from the hardware store. He fished a few out and brought them to his lips; for a second his tongue tasted the real thing. Not fool’s gold, this was honest-to-goodness gold. Tasteless. As real as it could get. As real as he could make it.

  The next day Simon got down to business; he did some digging over the phone and found out where he could put his hands on the maps he needed—maps that were produced every day. They were archived at the National Weather Records Center in Asheville, North Carolina. It was all there, supposedly. Years of daily temperature and wind speed readings, huge three-foot-by-four-foot maps—“surface charts,” the nice woman on the end of the line had called them—all reduced to tiny bite-sized spring rolls of data-laden microfilm.

  Weather maps—it seemed so obvious now that he had thought of it. Hindsight like a dog eating its own tail—the time line entropy thing. Potential into kinetic; hindsight being the best of both worlds: seeing how milk got spilt and not having to cry over it.

  His plan was to dowse the weather map records the way Gordon Quarendon had shown him, scan them back through time till he came up with Peter Abbott’s birth date and birthplace. Use his St. Christopher medal the way Gordon had used his old car key.

  He wouldn’t have to go to Asheville physically; he could remote view the archive in real time, get it done a lot faster that way—like Luscious Jane’s little test the first week he was at Calliope: sticking his remote head in that metal box up in the attic to find out what was on the roll of 35mm film.

  The only complication would be the dowsing trick; he wasn’t sure if it was possible to do it remotely—with an ethereal rendition of a medal that was still round the neck of his real body back on the hotel bed.

  Peter Abbott was the prime target of course, but there was also Polythene Pam to deal with too. And he knew her birth date already, from his scan of the files in Jane’s office. February
24, 1968—three years older than he was; about five years younger than Peter. A twelve-year-old with tits, as far as he was concerned, but the important thing was that like all the others she predated him birth-wise. No chance of doing a Ron Koch.

  His first impulse was to leave her till the end, get Peter out of the way first. But he wanted to get the gusto back into this game—it was turning into something like a job at minimum wage—what happened to Good Day Sunshine? Being bad wasn’t any fun if no one knew how bad you were.

  Doing Peter in first would be like making love to a woman passed out on the floor. The guy wouldn’t know what hit him; what he was missing. He wanted to make a game out of it, watch the guy squirm. Get a little taste of schadenfreude, then later on, a whole meal of putting the guy out of his misery. Peter wouldn’t be able to forget her—that was the beauty of it. He would remember what he’d had and what he’d lost and no one would be there to help him get over it—no one would care. Everyone would think he was crazy.

  He suddenly realized how much he hated the guy. The way Peter had kept his mouth shut that time when he’d pulled the plastic ring out of old Thornquist’s little gray box—just sat there with his eyes fixed on him, passing judgment, that was it. All these hotshot wannabe baby boomers passing judgment.

  42

  . . . raw data like a Beaujolais

  Simon had all the money he needed—for now. The gold had been much easier to dispose of than he’d ever imagined. People in the woodwork who didn’t ask questions. Coming up into the murky flicker of his rented-by-the-hour Internet access point; going back down again with the goods. The proverbial blind eye about reporting it all to the Feds. Anything could be bought—and sold it seemed.

  He opened a bank account, and headed west. Riding his Wells Fargo card, showing hotel clerks and gas station jockeys this tasty old bubble gum card image of the stagecoach and then just walking away with the stuff: gasoline, a new pair of Doc Martins, nice rooms with little bottles of shampoo and hot chocolate chip cookies sometimes, handed to you when you checked in as if you were a little kid and were being rewarded for doing something exceptional—winning a spelling bee. Money never changed hands really—just a smile and a moment of silence while the ticking little box beside the phone blessed the transaction with a wafer of paper.