A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  There was a cold fog hanging in the air outside his window. It looked out on a patch of lawn that fell off steeply toward a thicket of overgrown bushes. Passmore College—the name of the place was like the rider on the horse of what he saw out the window. He knew it the way he knew his name, his phone number; the extension number to his small suite of rooms, here in what used to be the dormitory. It was all part of another life, a new strand in the thickening rope of his memories. Sixty-four versions of them now—two to the power of the five disappearances. Ron, Gordon, Larry, Anita, Pam. The pruning of each one from the world had reconstructed the branch itself, not just eliminated the twig.

  After a few days, Pam gathered in his consciousness like a recurring dream. The vision of her impinging on this barren one, not so barren really—Jenny, the woman he saw occasionally, the new part of him like the dream part overlapping, interfering, his head swimming for an instant, vertiginous, rattling the underpinnings of who he was. That was familiar at least, the disorientation.

  Pam’s gone—struck him every so often like the blow of a heavy, soft pillow; but at the same time, the shock of it was absorbed by the parallel conviction that she had never been part of his life—which made him feel all the more guilty for being the one left behind. And if this loss was anything like all the others, he knew that she had never been part of anyone’s life.

  Peter turned on the TV just in time to see the anchorman ending the news. He was wrapping up the latest report on the collapse of East Germany. The New Millennium. How it all fit with the predictions of Nostradamus and Revelation. All old hat to Peter; it had a déjà vu familiarity about it. A filament of an event from one of the strands of alternate memories. As the anchor signed off, he raised his hand in an odd salute that again seemed right from the perspective of this new edition of things. Or was it an old tradition in Cedar Rapids, and something consistent through the turns his life had taken, and now that everything was suspect even this quirk of behavior seemed alien and makeshift.

  There was one constant in all this—Simon. Simon behind it all. No doubt about it now—he felt it deep inside of himself. I’m the only one left. Why? Why is he saving me till last? What does he want from me?

  The phone rang. It was Jenny; she leapfrogged the pleasantries and waded into an account of the session she had just come out of—with Rick her tech “familiar.”

  “He had me actually down there with the grunts—at ground zero. The front line people. Right in the middle of it all. Jesus, it was—it was like I don’t know, really tense. These guys were—”

  He found himself drifting off; making sounds in the appropriate places but not really listening. The memories again, swinging his attention away from the conversation. “I don’t think they were just, you know, checking out how fast I could get into OBE mode—” Jenny was saying, just as he got a flash of Pam with him on the beach looking over her shoulder raising her feet behind her one after the other to take off her sandals. Her hand coming up to his cheek; the scent of orange on her fingers, the fingernails chewed back to nothing.

  It was Veterans Day, Armistice Day, Remembrance Day too, to some people. All about the war dead of the Great War, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery on the TV for a moment or two of the evening news. The snow was coming down through the fitful patches of sunlight like petals from a blossoming tree high above the panicked clouds.

  He was led into a lab he had never seen before and made to lie down on a half-filled waterbed. The temperature of the water was set to ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, the technician said. The young guy’s white coat was too long for him; the hem of it looked frayed and mud-speckled, as if he’d inherited it from someone even shorter.

  In darkness now, with his psychometric link in his hands—a pair of shoes—the headphones full of the incessant susurration of the sea. St. Martin in his head, the white sand and the blue sky: a flag of memories wrapping around him. Pam lay on her stomach reading with a finger in her mouth, her long hair pushed behind sunglasses; the blue bathing suit she had bought that time in Philipsburg cupped her buttocks—“What’s up, Pete?” (The harsh brown buzz of the technician’s voice broke through the white noise.) “You’re nowhere near alpha. Something on your mind?”

  “No, no. Give me, give me another few minutes.”

  Pam was with him now all the time—it was an obsession; he felt comfortable calling it that. He was preoccupied with the need to dwell on the parallel line of his life he had spent with her. It all seemed real, as real as anything could be, as any memory could be. But fiction, all of it, he kept telling himself. A relic, a dream, a framed and matted portrait of something outside of who he was now.

  On a long weekend he took a trip to Minneapolis and looked her up. The phone book wasn’t much help—forty Gilfords were listed and the few P. Gilfords he called were all Peters. He remembered her telling him about the neighborhood she grew up in: Edena, and he took a taxi out there and walked the streets for an hour or so—as if that would help. Neat postwar frame bungalows amid thickets and boulevards of mature oak and maple. He imagined her glancing down at the humps in the sidewalk where the roots had outgrown their plot of narrow turf next to the curb, her eyes imprinted with the pattern of broken concrete. Here where he was standing, next to the red-brick school with its chain-link fence. He touched it and he imagined he could feel her small fingers (he couldn’t bring himself to believe she had actually been there: It’s all in your head, he told himself. Delusion; a psychometric mirage)—the delicate web of skin between them—clinging. Stubby, gnawed ends poking through the hexes of it. Hanging on.

  He didn’t know her father’s first name or her mother’s maiden name so he was left with nothing but the physical need to chase her down, with his legs and his extra sense of smell; the psychic bloodhound in him came up short in the end—not a whiff. She was never there; she had never been anywhere.

  All in your head, he had to tell himself again. That was all that was left of her. Simon had made sure of that; and he was the only other one who could corroborate his story. Is one version of the narrative enough? He knew that for sure now—Simon Hayward was behind it all.

  He wondered if he could go back to the early days of Calliope in St. Martin, but in this time line Calliope had never ever been there. The forking path of the organization had somehow taken a different turn before Peter had been drawn into the picture. All the changes in the flow of things—Simon’s handiwork; his deletions and adjustments—had steered Calliope itself in a different direction. Eli Thornquist had never been part of Calliope—nor Jane Franklin. That part of some of the strands of his memory had been completely eradicated from this latest version of things. He could only remote view the past of the world he was in now—and he could only view the common past of all of the missing Calliope people further upstream, before it all got polluted with Simon’s shit-disturbing. How far back would that be? Back before Larry was born—conceived of. Back in the early forties.

  On impulse he had called a friend in Pittsburgh, a stagehand he’d met in a production of Man of La Mancha back in the eighties, and asked him to check out Anita Spalding. He said he had a relative in the private investigation business, a Gerry Sanchez who worked out of Philadelphia; and after a few moments Peter finally came round to saying yes, he would be willing to pay to “get the job done right.”

  Two weeks later he got an invoice and a letter from Sanchez saying there were no records for an Anita Spalding who had been born in Pittsburgh in the late fifties. The closest match was an “Anne Spalding” who had died last year at the age of ninety.

  He had even less to go on as far as Larry McEwan was concerned—all Peter could remember was something about him growing up near Buffalo, New York. Gordon Quarendon, of course, was a different story. Gordon had kept nothing to himself and Peter knew for sure when and where he had been born.

  A week later he got a call from Sanchez saying he had found a Gordon Quarendon born on the day in qu
estion, November 2, 1956. He had come up with a birth certificate but also a death certificate for the same party dated about seven weeks later. “Crib death,” he said, “as far as I can make out.” The mention of crib death triggered something that chimed like a bell on the deck of a shipwreck far below the surface of Peter’s consciousness—a distant memory of a dream, or a conversation about a dream. “The kid stopped breathing in the middle of the night. That’s what the medical examiner’s office report says anyway. Natural causes.”

  “You seem distracted—down in the dumps.” Jenny was making coffee in the kitchen. Her voice carried over the clatter of sliding drawers and running water. She did this all the time—asked him important questions with her back to him. As if the eye contact would distort the message in some way. But she was a psychic like himself, gifted in the way that made it hard sometimes for him to let down the drawbridge. “You used to be a pretty happy person; now you’re moody all the time,” she said as she came into the room with a tray—cups, the sugar and cream, a plate of oatmeal cookies, napkins: the little things, the protocols meant something to Jenny, the thank-yous and the you’re-welcomes. She finally looked at him and, seeing no answer coming, raised her chin and smiled—the kind of smile that converts a query into a mere observation.

  She had the body of an athlete and it allowed her to fold her legs under her on the couch and still hold on to the tray. She was wearing track pants and a thin T-shirt. She waited for him to clear the books and papers from the coffee table before putting it down. Jenny was lithe and plump all at once; her young, supple body like new foam rubber in some places, wicker furniture in others. She could make her toes move each one by itself—something he had never been able to do.

  “It’s the weather, I guess, the time of the year,” he finally said when she was settled on the coach.

  “Maybe you need a vacation; somewhere warm, the Caribbean—how about that? You and me?” His mind leaking out even here. Nothing sacred. Pam like an open book if he kept this up. I could tell her about Pam and see what happens, he thought. Confession as a lightning rod, the electrons of his misery shunted to earth, the power station of his angst decommissioned by the simple act of saying the words: Pam. Love. Gone. Crazy about her. Literally.

  He could see clearly now how one woman could eclipse the other—how if Pam walked into the room right now Jenny would fade to penumbral obscurity. Such is the power of love and obsession. But here he was in this real world with a woman whose presence had a heritage of textures and smells and liquid confluences that were undeniably his. The palpable moistness of contiguous play he could depend on. This was as real as anything could be—life in the here and now, with a woman who at times seemed like a stranger to him or, at best, an old girlfriend whose nuanced habits were like the lines of a role in a play he had done years before.

  And sometimes Pam broke through as just a vague afterimage; a footprint, a concavity where this new life—this other life with Jenny—was convex, robust. He knew that if he could leave it alone it would fade eventually—memory was like the banks of a river, the flow of time smoothed out the rough edges as it dropped things off and picked things up along the way. But he didn’t want to let it go. Letting it go would damn her to total oblivion. He was all she had left.

  After the coffee they went for a walk across campus. The snow had stopped falling but the wind was keeping it from melting. It gathered in patches around the mounds of raked leaves and in the lee of the stone steps. They ended up at the site of the new addition that was being tacked on to what used to be the dining hall. It was a bold statement in concrete and glass (it looked to Peter like the front of a Rolls-Royce) that said nothing about what would be going on inside; what had gone on before in the buildings that surrounded it. An orange plastic fence blocked the way to the front entrance. Beyond it Peter could see a Dumpster piled with construction debris; it looked like a barge run aground on a barren, pockmarked moonscape. The icing-sugar of new snow made the peaks and troughs of the disturbed ground into whitecaps.

  “Can we get inside yet?” Peter said into his turned-up collar. He could see light coming from halfway up the facade of glass.

  “With the right clothes—hard hats, safety boots. That’s all we need—for now. The word is, they’re going to be putting in some kind of high-tech security system.” She was sensible and efficient the way his mother had been—in a way that Pam had never been—and this gave him comfort. The knowledge required of a pragmatic march through life was always within arm’s reach of Jenny. She was just like Mrs. Abbott in other ways too. The way she took her time in answering him sometimes—not because she was indecisive, it was more to do with calm deliberateness.

  Not his real mother, no. No one reminded him of his real mother. She was still a mystery. The shadowy figure with a soft voice—a smell that awoke in him sometimes; the feel of her hands under his arms when she picked him up—all vague and elusive like a star that looms bright only in your peripheral vision. None of the permutations of his world had uncovered anything new about her. That part of his life—the vacancy of it—had remained intact.

  “I’ll ask Jeff tomorrow,” Jenny was saying now as she turned away from the building, after a silence. “See if he can set it up for us.” Jeff Turnbull, the lab supervisor. CEO and lab supervisor of PsiberTech Incorporated. For a second it didn’t sound quite right—the name “PsiberTech.” And Peter remembered, then, with a chilling pang of remorse (the wind seemed to pass right through him for a moment) and contrition too for letting his guard down—letting this detail fall away from his consciousness—that the name of the organization was really “Calliope” and not “PsiberTech.” It had been “Calliope,” he had to believe it, absolutely—and in some ways it still was. If he was going to hold on to Pam he would have to hold on to that name as well.

  44

  “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

  Simon couldn’t believe how screwed up the world was—the stock market way down for some reason, some dork in the White House he’d never heard of—well, he had heard of him of course, but not till this latest “adjustment” had made him actually conscious of the fact that he was part of a new version of things. Again.

  Taking out Pam’s father had been a little more repercussive than he’d anticipated. Pam’s nipped-in-the-bud dad must have been like debris clogging the narrows of a stream: the poor slob had clout, a logjam of a guy—maybe little Pam herself had been the variable. Or it was just cumulative and each successive adjustment made more and more of an impact on the time line. He would never know, and right now he would rather not think about it—he didn’t have the energy for it.

  The sheer weight of it all bearing down on his shoulders and neck (it felt as if his memories had real mass; each swivel of his head made him stagger) had forced him to sort things out, concentrate on the boundary line between what was and what had been.

  He lay back on his bed and made himself think about something else—about music. He’d just bought a CD by a group called the Havana Gila Monsters. They were into a strange pastiche of klezmer and salsa—which was the sort of music he liked, of course; because technically he had been here all his life—the most recent part of him, at least—the paradox again: I like these guys—sort of. But Beatles music would show up in a bank or a supermarket: a Muzak version of “Yesterday” or “Help.” Occasionally he’d hear the real thing on the car radio. Bits and pieces of lyric and melody were always out there somewhere.

  His vintage vinyl version of the White Album had disappeared he realized then, lost in the shuffle of things along the way—all of his Beatles memorabilia: his two yards of Beatles wallpaper; the two ticket stubs from the Shea Stadium concert back in 1965—he’d never owned any of it. The music was around here of course, part of the fabric of things, out there in the record stores—but this latest version of himself was not the truly enthralled fan that he’d been in the alternate versions of himself. There was all that to contend with—the dissonance thi
ng, the ambiguity of all that he remembered.

  He still was a dedicated Beatles fan, the old part of him—the pre-“Pamicide” part of him was, anyway. It was at the root of who he was; there was no getting away from it.

  Another thing: there was no Madonna in this world, or the Spice Girls—which for Simon was a mini-tragedy; he’d always honored them as cherished comedic targets. No Howard Stern; or David Letterman. No Sharon Tate either, but her daughter—the child she had after the one with Polanski—was a runway model.

  But there were others that seemed to fill the void: an abysmally atrocious talk-show host with a parrot for a second banana; a pre-fabricated superstar “singing” group of Barbie doll wannabes from Glasgow called Butterscotch; a band from Australia that reminded him of the disco incarnation of the Bee Gees.

  Sometimes the Beatles were completely gone from his consciousness, usually after a few too many rum-and-Cokes; hours would go by and all of a sudden a snippet of song would pop into his head and for a second he would hold on to the belief that it was all his—that he’d been struck by a lightning bolt of musical inspiration, that the lyrics of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” had emerged from the birth canal of his own fulsome imagination.

  What bothered him was that his lapses of memory weren’t consistent. He would say things to chicks he met in bars and they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He would be derailed by the old time lines of references, the ones from way back before he was into the RV game; they would wash over him and short-circuit his funny bone. The cultural raw materials of the world he was in now would fade away. It felt like he was disabled sometimes—as if someone had cut out his tongue.