A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  It was a constant everywhere it seemed—the computer-driven, money-lubricated spend game. His adjustments hadn’t affected any of it. Or he was developing some sort of time-line-tinkering Alzheimer’s, and it all just felt right because he couldn’t remember it being any different.

  He spent a few days working his way through Arizona, stopping at the Grand Canyon, just for form’s sake, then on into California. He avoided LA and headed straight up the I-5 and cut over from Sacramento to the Napa Valley to spend a few bucks on the local wine.

  He met a girl in a bakery in Sonoma of all places who thought having lived in Vancouver was something special; she had a ring through her nose, wore clothes made in third world countries by children, and used the word “cool” the way his mother used “nice.” He paid for his multigrain chicken and fried onion sandwich and said good-bye (“It’s been a blast . . . etc.”) and ate it on a bench in the town square. Under a flagpole with a bear flag on it—the first flag of California, supposedly, the plaque at the base of it said. That sounded odd to him, and he wondered again whether it was one of the side effects of his tinkering; or something he hadn’t come across before and would have been new to him even if he hadn’t made any changes at all.

  He pondered this conundrum for a while—the fact that he could never be sure one way or the other. He watched the tourists circle the square in their four-by-fours, the young moms with the strollers that looked like mountain bikes, then got in his rented car and headed out of town.

  The girl—he could have taken it further, he knew that; parlayed it into an evening of debauched distraction if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t have the energy for it; or maybe he’d been spoiled at Calliope—the Jane thing. It surprised him how indelible a mark she had made on his internal dream-girl web site, if you could call it that (the lust links in his stream of consciousness kept bringing him back there again and again)—the Jungian shrine to the anima in all of us.

  He headed west aiming for Lake Tahoe but didn’t quite make it; he was overcome with a weariness he put down to the chicken sandwich or the Napa Merlot mixed with the Sonoma Zinfandel and decided to stop for the night outside Reno.

  When he got to Lake Tahoe, he circled the lake for the day and ended up at a half-decent place right at the base of the ski hill. A hotel with a lobby and valet parking and a ski shop right across from the front desk. Not that there was much snow out there yet, except what he could see topping the distant peaks on the other side of the lake—it just felt good knowing the mountain was there if he wanted to take the gondola to the top and pretend he was back in Vancouver.

  He stayed in his room and watched TV for a day or so, trying to get rid of the headache he seemed to wake up every morning with these days. TV and the occasional movie—the Sharon Tate thing again, even though she was dead again in one part of his bundled memory . . . wasn’t she? (A car accident or something like that?) He tracked down the revised version of Nashville at a video store near the casinos on the Nevada side of town. And one of the movies from her comeback phase: To Die For. She had a bit part as the mother of the Nicole Kidman character and she played it with a Joan Collins shrillness to her voice that put him off. Better to stick with Valley of the Dolls from here on in, he decided—and that one with Dean Martin, The Wrecking Crew.

  He took the casino shuttle to Harrah’s one night and put up with the cigarette smoke and the time share harassment to make a few bucks at the blackjack table. He stuck at it for about twenty minutes, working his way up to hundred-dollar bets before giving in to common sense and letting the dealer win some of it back. The pit boss wandered over and stood there like a bouncer for a while but Simon just looked him straight in the eye and smiled.

  When he figured he’d made enough for one night, he slipped off his stool, fed a few ten-dollar chips to the poker-faced dealer with the disfigured bow tie, stuffed the rest in his pockets, and headed for the cashier.

  His heart was racing as he walked through the crowds to the escalator. He was scared of these people: the pit boss and all the heavy brows on the other ends of the surveillance cameras; he could feel them watching him. The back of his head was on fire with it. So much for the good life. There must be easier ways to make a buck, he told himself.

  There was snow falling where he found Pam the first time—he was there just to watch, he told himself. I like to watch. He’d decided to take the passive armchair approach, fall into a low-stress RV mode and glide on down to the surface of things and drift with the ticking of the clock for a while: just being there was enough for now.

  A little girl in a nylon snowsuit—cherry-pink. Her breath like a wand of mist—a winter magic trick. The expanse of snow in the flat afternoon light was an erasure of where she wasn’t.

  He had zeroed in on a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, at least eight or nine years after her birth date (FEBRUARY 24, 1968, it had said on the file in Jane’s office). In a park near a small lake. Her brother was pretending not to care as his friend, a boy wearing a Boston Bruins wool hat and a sky-blue ski jacket, gathered up a powdery two-hand snowball and flung it in her direction.

  Oh my God, what am I doing here? Another little kid. Shit, not like Gordon—Jesus, not another innocent child. He couldn’t deal with it—the knowing: better to fix in his mind the picture of the pain-in-the-ass, baffed-out, retro flower child with the sneering face that didn’t bother hiding the fact that she’d rather go for a swim in a pool of pig shit than be in the same room with him. That kind of image—not this one: the cute little kid in nineteen seventy whatever growing up with a lifetime pass to Mary Tyler Moore World.

  He came up for a breather, got off the bed, and made himself a drink—his tried-and-true concoction of vodka, orange juice, and a hit of Classic Coke. He propped the pillow behind his back and flicked on the TV. CNN full of Senate race blather; stuff about King Hussein’s funeral (hadn’t he died a few years back?); a little item about how eggs were good for people with chronic fatigue syndrome . . . He skimmed till he found an old movie starring Cary Grant and a woman he’d never heard of—she looked like a cross between Jean Harlow and Kim Bassinger; he drew a blank and put it down to trivia overload—eight or more worlds of it, all mixed together like a Love Canal hazardous-waste cocktail.

  He shut the thing off and made himself another drink; he went out for ice and the Muzak playing in the hallway was a Boston Pops version of “Penny Lane.” Thank God for the Beatles; he would never do anything to hurt the Beatles—not intentionally anyway. And if he did he would do all he could to undo it. John’s latest stuff—even better than the White Album, in some ways.

  It occurred to him then how much of who he was—who he thought he was—relied on the incidental bits and pieces of the world out there. He was eating into himself. Whenever he mucked with the past he came back into a world where there was less of himself than there was before. His mind full of a lot more data, but not much of it was information. Raw Data was like a Beaujolais. Wit, knowledge, wisdom—that was something else again. The good stuff had to age in the oak cask of his brain.

  Back on the bed now, the urination thing out of the way, the dehydration thing—he wondered if the altitude up here in Lake Tahoe would affect anything: six thousand feet or something like that—the door locked, checked, the gas fireplace on so he wouldn’t get chilled like last time—shoes off, belt loosened . . . show time. Bye bye Miss American Pie.

  Simon listened to the purr of the fireplace fan and watched the blue numbers on the clock radio reconfigure their zigzag digital selves into lines and dots that told him it was 8:32 P.M. He closed his eyes and started his descent—through the alpha calm and then into a marginal realm of alertness that always reminded him of his childhood bout of delirium: the clarity of thought, the crispness of focus, and then up into ethereal floating—the transition into gentle buoyancy usually came with a subtle snap of release that seemed to cut him free of the moorings. His out-of-body self set free like an untethered dirigible.

 
; Up and out of himself through the ceiling to the room above—a woman sat on the edge of the bed in a terry housecoat painting her toenails: shit, he’s so full of it; that way he has of telling everyone he meets every goddam thing there is to know about him. Jesus, who gives a shit . . . God this stuff is a lot redder than I remember—up through the cloud of her thoughts to the roof of the hotel—on past the rooftop tennis court. Across the valley and out over the lake; then back into himself, turning the sky inside out—from ultraviolet to infrared . . .

  Down, down the line of things, back—tumble . . . double half pike back flip . . . here we go: Pam’s mom and dad, May of 1967. St. Paul, Minnesota. Just before the Summer of Love. It would be another year before the myth would make it to the top of the charts. All that stuff about Haight-Ashbury and putting posies in your hair.

  Bell-bottoms hadn’t been invented yet—not as far as the kids were concerned, and guys with shoulder-length hair were something you only saw on Cronkite. “They’re known as the Diggers—a group of young college kids living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco dedicated to the golden rule philosophy of—” or pop music shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig: Glen Campbell in a black turtleneck; Bobby Sherman trying to grow sideburns.

  A parking lot outside a cartoon knockoff of a Swiss chalet—Hansel and Gretel with a bit of The Sound of Music thrown in, he thought. The marquee telling a different story—MARIO’S FINE ITALIAN DINING.

  “Kiss me.”

  “Okay.” He put his hand behind her head and gave her a big kiss right on the lips.

  “That was good,” she said, her bottom lip evaluating, her head nodding—playful distancing shit like she was pretending it didn’t matter.

  Dave Gilford shrugged and opened the door for her. The restaurant smelled of garlic and steamed pasta. As she went in ahead of him he could see a pink impression on the back of her neck where he’d pulled her head toward his. His own strength suddenly known to him. She had wanted some sort of assurance, he figured. That this wasn’t the last time he would actually see her on a formal basis. The kiss like the seal of a notary public; something she could put away in a safety-deposit box. She turned and gave him a look that said they could bypass the dinner thing if he wanted. Get right down to business. A real Girl of the Sixties.

  He said, “Let’s just eat, okay?”

  Sex was like dessert. “Afters,” as this English guy Dave used to work with called it. They’d be out in the field somewhere—he’d been a surveyor back then doing work on the interstate up near St. Cloud or some place in Wisconsin, he couldn’t remember for sure—they’d end up in some greasy spoon for dinner and the waitress would come over to clear away what was left of their banquet burger specials and he’d say “What’s for afters?” just to get her goat, so he could explain himself—about “afters” being what English people called dessert—and get another thirty seconds of attention. Anyway, Dave always abided by that rule of thumb: sex was for “afters.”

  The sign on the lectern just inside the door said “Please wait to be seated” written in fancy lettering. And they waited till a girl wearing a red checkered apron came over and led them into the back of the restaurant.

  Little Miss Connie Wright with the nice ass, in front of him now heading for the table—tight short skirt and no bra, or one of those bras that made it look like there wasn’t any bra, but he couldn’t see any strap marks or anything through her sweater—just like all the hippie kids these days making a statement about so-called women’s liberation. He was a sucker for nice tits—and hers were more than not half bad. Considering she was pushing thirty-five, maybe thirty-seven. Good tits looked you straight in the eye, whispered sweet nothings in your ear, sang in two-part harmony, like Steve and Eydie—that kind she had.

  “I am not going in there begging for a deal just because he knew my father,” he was saying to her now, continuing something they had started in the car coming over.

  “I’m not asking you to beg. I just want you to get the best price you can.”

  “It’s just a dining room table and six lousy chairs, for Christ’s sake; you want furniture, there’s a place over in Medina that’s got better than anything he’s got.”

  “Not that table and chairs.”

  He sighed and turned his head away from her as if he were looking for someone to back him up on how unreasonable she was; then he leaned back and took out his cigarettes. The shirt fabric over his midsection looked freshly ironed for a second. “Can we eat now?” He glanced down at the menu, then out across the room looking for the waitress.

  “Sure you can ‘eat’ now. Here, have some sugar. How about some goddam ketchup? What’s your problem—”

  “I mean ‘order’ now, okay? Smart-ass.” He opened the menu and squinted, his mouth silently working through the list of entrees, tasting them word by word.

  “I want that table and chairs because it matches the hutch that was my grandmother’s, okay? How many times do I have to tell you.”

  Connie Wright and Dave Gilford had known each other since the sixth grade—if being aware of each other’s existence could be considered a form of acquaintance. It was only recently that they had become friends—but right from the start there was a married-couple familiarity in the way they interacted—as if being in the same community, living a few blocks apart, had mated them in some way, put them on the same wavelength.

  It had nothing to do with love; or even companionship. They had skipped all of that, leapfrogged the preliminaries, and waded right into the weedy river of commitment—that desperate state of mutually assured distress that to a later generation would become known as co-dependency. Connie told her mother she had a sixth sense about it—and that was why she put up with the crap he dropped in her lap every so often. She was positive they were meant to be together.

  Simon could see all this—the big picture; the perpendicular perspective—from his ethereal perch in the quantum state of RV displacement—but the information was coming from somewhere beyond its point of origin—there was an echo of it hitting his inner ear long before the initial signal broke through the noise—as if someone else were drawing the information out of him and feeding it back.

  Pam was already here, in a way—he sensed that, but it couldn’t be—she wasn’t even conceived of yet but here she was, her personality saturating the place. A deflection of data, that’s all—get on with it, he told himself.

  That song by the Beatles, “Polythene Pam,” started running through his head.

  Just get on with it.

  “You’re too fat, Dave. Look at you. Your gut’s hanging out—roll over . . .”

  “Love handles, baby. Love handles . . .”

  “You’re breathing like a freight train and I haven’t even—that’s it. Oh yes. Shit that feels good.”

  He started to sing through the wheeze of his labored breathing: “Oh baby, just a little bit—oh Jesus—” He coughed and held his breath; he went very still for a moment and then there was a long, rippling shudder Connie could feel run right through him; right through her. God. That was quick, she thought. Just got it up and he’s coming already. Not like Dave at all. Not after a couple of drinks . . .

  Simon didn’t bother with a full-blown materialization, this time. He opted for something he hadn’t tried before. What the hell . . . more like a partial materialization, really. Just for a moment; a half second. He was taking a sort of hit-and-run approach. The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold . . . His thumb and forefinger. A pinch hit-and-run. He had studied his Gray’s Anatomy and had a pretty good idea about what he should be aiming for—the conceptual coordinates, if not the actual physical ones—the coronary artery, the one that fed the muscles of the heart. (This is the exhibit we all pause to reflect upon—we sometimes press our faces right up against the display case—when we visit the Hypochondriac’s Chamber of Horrors; the one where you can actually see the flow of blood dwindle to a syrupy, platelet-rich, congealing, pink trickle.)
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  Connie didn’t so much as scream when she climbed off him. It was more like a long keening wail. Something from a Greek tragedy. She was thumping at Dave’s chest when Simon pulled back up into the ether—and it surprised him for a second how far he’d come, how removed he could be from it all—two in one blow; that was a first for him. He had actually gone out of his way to murder someone this time.

  Pam undone before she was born and this poor sucker taken out in the prime of his day, if not the prime of his life. A double play.

  And the funny thing was, Simon really didn’t give a shit.

  43

  . . . lest we forget

  Peter held on to her all through what he hoped was sleep. A semblance of Pam broke through the darkness (the smell and feel of her there beside him in bed; the flannel pajamas she liked to wear sometimes—as clear in his mind as anything could be) and jolted him back into the cold white glow of what he had lost. It left a flashbulb burn mark on his soul that was both a vacancy and an irritating distraction at the same time. She had never been part of his life and now she was the all-consuming object of it; she had been the focus of every waking moment and now she was gone. His consciousness suddenly a two-sided coin; Janus facing both ways.

  All the next day he kept seeing her at different times in his life: when he was twenty-two wanting to be the next James Dean and she was seventeen; where she would have been when he was thirteen years old: he had desperately wanted a suit like the one John Travolta wore in Saturday Night Fever; he had believed that the ability to twirl on the dance floor wearing a tight white suit was exactly what was needed to win the heart of that one special girl in his eighth-grade class. Pam would have been an eight-year-old kid growing up in Minneapolis. A citizen of his world, if not part of it.