A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  There and not there. At the same time. He remembered posing this way, with the false beard (or was it a mustache?) and the hair touched with gray—of having to concentrate on keeping his eyes open in spite of the sun in his face—but there was another parallel memory of being lost in a dreamlike ethereal world of taunting gremlins that herded him closer to the target but pulled him away from it at the last minute.

  He remembered the glass bottle in his hands turning into liquid, then glass again; then a mercurial syrup that crystallized into crumpled paper, a scrap of paper with something written on it: a message the creatures wanted him to have—a message that seemed fraught with absolute meaning. They wanted him to remember something that was very important: Take this home with you—nach Hause.

  But in those last few moments of his journey, the paper had crumbled to ashes and fallen in flames from his fingers. The pain had been real—that, he was sure of. And still was. He noticed then, as if for the first time, the bandage on his right hand, and the smaller one around the ring finger of his left.

  “Something went wrong, Peter—you’re not in the picture, okay? Sixteen—what we started out with. There’s only sixteen guys here. Count them.”

  Peter counted and came up with sixteen. He tried again and each time he glanced at the print, his own image—the figure he had been convinced was his own image—receded into a part of his memory that mimicked déjà vu; the image of himself dipped into oblivion—like luggage passing through the X-ray machine at the security gate of an airport—and emerged in his consciousness as one that had always been there, outside of his own experience: as an objective part of the original photograph.

  “Let me try again; give me another shot at it—”

  “I don’t know, Pete. We’ll let you know. I don’t think you’re up to it right now. Get some rest.” Jeff got up from his desk and walked across the room.

  “I was there, Jeff. I was always there; don’t you see? You can’t remember me not being in the picture.” Peter sat down; he was starting to feel dizzy again.

  Jeff turned back around but found a way of not making eye contact: “I know—‘Time travel doesn’t work, or if it did work, we wouldn’t know the difference anyway’ (he said this in a contrived monotone), right?” Peter started to speak again but Jeff’s hand came up. “I’ve heard it all before—all the bullshit about paradox and the dragon eating its own tail, and infinite regress, and how it’s all holding itself up by its own bootstraps—it’s a pile of crap.” He took a deep breath. “And it doesn’t sit well with the shareholders and the CEO and the bank that’s holding our asses to the fire.

  “They want results, something to show for their money. Hard evidence, Peter. What am I supposed to tell them now? It works and that’s why we can’t prove it? If we can prove it, it doesn’t work?”

  Peter remembered something then, about Calliope and a man called Eli showing him a picture very much like the one on the desk. How the proof of the pudding would be the discovery of another print, or another daguerreotype taken of the Hamburg Art Club right after this one and hidden away somewhere. A latent image that had never seen the light of day—till now.

  He remembered him saying something about temporal isolation. The “Folded Time Line,” something about “pleated history.” A lot of theoretical stuff he hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Something to do with quantum mechanics, of all things. How if an event was not observed, not “collapsed into reality”—the “state vector”—yes, that was the expression he’d used—was held in a “superposition” of all possible states and—

  “I’m really sorry, Pete. It’s not just—this.” Jeff gestured toward the photograph. “You’re not performing the way you used to. I think we’re going to have to let you go. A leave of absence, maybe—suspension without pay? I don’t know.” Peter watched him turn away from him again; to face the huge floor-to-ceiling window. “I can’t decide right now,” he said, running a hand gently across the top of his head.

  Water was running down the inside of the glass and a towel had been hastily strung along the sill to catch it: a midwinter rainstorm was testing the bold intricacies of the new building’s roofline. A gust of wind sent a clatter of drops against the other side now—the outside of the window—and Jeff flinched as if it were coming right at him.

  In the twilight the patchy grass of the playing field below looked surprisingly green; a woman in a long dark raincoat was picking her way through dams of slush and pools of brown water. Where someone had driven a car onto the field and backed out again the tracks of compressed snow remained as parallel lines of white against the dark turf. It spelled out something: a swerving spiral that ended in a stylized, scripted “s”; and then a lowercase “i.” An “i” with no dot.

  He remembered seeing it before—the last time he was up here in Jeff’s office. Yes. A memory—a legitimate one this time.

  And then it all came back to him—the message he was supposed to bring back with him from the ether. He looked at his hand, at the bandage covering his palm. He pulled away the gauze and there it was: a livid slash down past the ball of his thumb as if the line cut into the crease of his palm (his life line, he realized then) had been intentional. You can change things, it was telling him, extend things. Nothing is permanent, nothing is carved in stone, or flesh . . . the Past as well as the Future?

  Or maybe in the middle of the session—on the way back from Hamburg in 1843—he had been trying to slash his wrists. Both scenarios were equally valid, he realized then. The paradox again. He had been giving up and forging ahead all in one move.

  But one thing he knew for sure (he would have to keep reminding himself of this): All the strands of memory are real, not just the latest one.

  All of them: the ones with Ron Koch, and Larry, and Gord Quarendon with his dowsing rods, and Anita with the cigarette stuck in her mouth all the time . . . All of them.

  And the time lines with Pam (every one of them up till the day she disappeared), especially the ones with Pam. You just have to choose.

  You have to choose. Not Simon or anyone else. You.

  51

  . . . a convergence of saints

  Late one night in the midst of a dream-strewn, fitful sleep Peter felt a tug in his mind. And a voice next to his ear saying, “Ring, Ring.” The next moment the phone rang.

  “You can hang up if you want to but, hey, what’s the point, right?”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want—shit man, you’re the one in need.” He sounded so close—but Peter knew that was to do with the phone system: he could be anywhere.

  “All I need is for you to just leave me alone, okay, Simon? You’ve done enough damage—”

  “‘Damage’! Shit, let me tell you about damage. Your fucking hack job has deprived me of the whole fucking world—”

  Jenny rolled over and groaned. Peter placed his hand on her shoulder and caught a flash of her dream: a plane dipping into a lake; the talon of an eagle or hawk where the wheel or pontoon should be; the smell of a campfire; cooking bacon; crushed cedar foliage . . .

  “—things like the ‘Summer of Love,’ bell-bottoms, the musical Hair—don’t you miss all that shit? I do, man. I do. The Avengers—I hate most of it but I still miss it.”

  Simon Hayward. Jesus, he sounded drunk. Peter swallowed and sat up. He looked over at the clock radio: it was three-forty in the morning. Pale blue liquid crystal numbers: “3:40”—here in this place he shared with Jenny. For a moment it all felt like a planet on the other side of the galaxy.

  He heard a rustling and a gentle click on the other end of the line, then the distant, swooping bleat of a passing siren. “Your time’s up, Peter. You are ‘NO MORE,’ but you don’t know it yet. Does that make any sense?” Peter heard him swallow, then sniff and then what must have been his glass touching down hard on a table. He could hear a faint, thin buzz of music in the background; it sounded like folk music—clarinets or saxophones over a Latin
beat.

  “I know who your mother is, Pete. Your real mother. She reminds me of someone. Someone I used to know, sort of. I quite like her actually—in fact I have a ‘date’ with her.”

  A ripple of fluid light as heavy as mercury—as mirrored as mercury—flowed across Peter’s field of vision. He felt a burning pain rush through the hand that held the receiver. He sensed that this was a warning, or at least a signal—from where, he did not know.

  . . . a seam opened up and closed again—and what it left behind was a gusset in the fabric, an optional interpretation of what would collapse and when. And now an “offer” wave of probability echoed back and forth through the ether.

  “What are you talking about? What’s my mother got to do with this?”

  “You remember the Beatles, right? The White Album? Sgt. Pepper’s? You’re the only one left on this planet who does. You and me, shit. Your fault, you fucking asshole. And the only way I’m going to make everyone remember the Beatles again is to fix it so they don’t remember you.” Peter heard the guy’s glass thud against the receiver, and a swallow. Then the sound of the glass hitting the table; then Simon’s voice speaking away from the phone: “—shit. Goddamit . . .”

  Peter tried to probe down the line of the phone; he poked around the edges of Simon’s mind searching for anything that would trigger an allusion to where he was right now, or what he was planning; but it was impossible to break through the carapace of Simon’s instinctive shield. “What do you want from me, Simon?”

  “What’s left of you. The part that’s left. You start something, you’ve got to finish it. I should have done you right after little Polythene Pam, you remember Pam? Pamela Gilford?”

  Peter hung up, but it didn’t make any difference. Simon’s voice was still in his head, digitally clear: You’ll never find me, Pete. Don’t ever try that again, by the way. Say good-bye. At least have the balls to say good-bye. Because there’s no way you can come after me. You still need a prop, don’t you? A stage business crutch, right?

  Peter got out of bed. He slipped on his clothes—a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, tennis shoes, and his overcoat with his cotton gloves in the pocket. Before heading out the door he came back into the bedroom. Jenny was still asleep, buried up to her ears in the duvet. He took a moment to lean in close and kiss her forehead. Gently, so he wouldn’t disturb her. She murmured something but stayed asleep. He wanted to protect her from what he had to do but he knew he couldn’t. Tell her something that would make it all easier, but that was impossible too. He was going to change things—for better or worse. Whatever happened, he hoped she remembered him, that she would still have a place in the weave of things to be able to remember him.

  The air was damp with mist and the lights strung along the narrow road between the dormitory and the quadrangle were a dotted line of blurred hope. For the first time in a long time he felt alive. He wondered whether it was nothing more than chemicals in the brain—adrenaline and the tryptamine derivative—taking command of the situation. Or like the director’s notes after opening night—maybe some external force was pushing him down this path. All a big act, a posturing that had nothing to do with what he really wanted. The script had been written somewhere else, somewhen else—he didn’t even know anymore what part he had to play in it.

  Simon was right, though. He did need a psychometric link. Without one he was helpless, like a stringless kite. But where was he going to get it? Maybe the drug would be enough, the power of the drug. The last injection before lift-off—the “booster shot,” Jeff called it. With its slightly different chemical structure—the higher octane version.

  He climbed the steps to the door of the new building, punched in the numbers at the door lock, and got the green light to enter—he was in. Jeff hadn’t followed through yet. The security system still thought he belonged there.

  The squeak of his damp tennis shoes on the marble floor of the atrium echoed through the cathedral space. There was something missing here even when the place was bustling with activity, he realized then. The soul, of course, was not part of the vocabulary here, of articulated columns and barrel vaults of glass. This was all about money, science—nothing more. At most, a plunder of the spirit world.

  When Simon finally put the phone down he knew he had done the wrong thing. Sending out feelers like that, even after the guy had hung up on him, had been a mistake. He was overcome with anxiety again—the booze could never keep it away for very long.

  He went into the bathroom and got a piece of wet tissue and wiped down the handset of the phone—not that it would actually do much good, but it made him feel better; part of him feel better. He flushed the paper down the toilet and did it all over again, watching himself do it, knowing it was just compulsive, robot shit—a rhetorical question posed by a parrot: a parrot suffering from echolalia.

  He never should have said anything, especially about the guy’s mother, or Pam either, for that matter. It just got the guy all riled up. Maybe mad enough to do something about it. But what could he do? Really? Without the security blanket of a PL? The fucker had screwed up everything, wiped the Beatles off the face of the earth, for God’s sake—and if it pissed him off, fine. Suffer, you asshole.

  His brain was racing and stumbling at the same time—should never drink alone—no bartender to keep tabs on him, just the row of empty bottles. The vodka bottles and the orange juice cartons, or whatever he could get his hands on; the contents of them disappearing as the world around him turned ghoulish and hostile, or the opposite—into an old house cat or loyal dog. Friendly and subordinate. His plaything. Then back to a snarling, rabid remnant of his childhood. He’d hated dogs when he was a kid. His friend’s dog, Soldier. Fucking hound from Hell.

  Sleep it off. Sober up, then do it, for Christ’s sake. Get rid of the bastard. In fact, what am I waiting for? What are they going to charge me with? Drunk RV-ing?—an OUI? An “OBE under the influence”?

  Peter reached the bank of elevators. Again he needed his code number; he keyed it into the touch pad and the doors opened. Up the six floors to the labs; the reception area first with the cold coffee machine and dark computer monitors.

  The next door proved a little tricky. He ended up using Jenny’s number. It was as if Jeff were telling him about his precarious position at PsiberTech: There’s only so far we’re going to let you go from here on in. He knew her number because she had told him late one night in bed: “1-6-1-2-2.” His own name transformed by the simple substitution of numbers for the letters of the alphabet: Peter Abbott: “Pabb.” Sixteen-one-two-two.

  He found the small bottles of the experimental drug just sitting there, in the small bar fridge beside the sink and the coffee maker. Three of them with “Tripta-907” and a date written on the label. He touched it and knew it was Jeff’s writing—knew that the label had been put on the bottle by his assistant. Her saliva mixed with the glue gave him the muddy impression of her cat scratching at her bedroom door.

  A “best-before” date? Or the date this batch was produced? He couldn’t tell and he didn’t much care anyway. As long as it gets me out of here. Gets me where I want to be—that’s all that counts, he told himself.

  But he was going to need more than the drug. It overwhelmed him then—the helplessness of the situation. He panicked for a second and the weight of what he was attempting compressed his anxiety into pain—physical pain. His hand again, the one he had injured on his trip back to Hamburg. A throbbing ache that ran up his arm and fell into the pit of his stomach.

  He could stick the needle in his thigh—he was prepared for that, even though he hated needles—but the psychometric link: where was that going to come from? Simon was ready to do him in—the surgical strike (the abortive strike was what it really was)—all the talk about his biological mother—he was going to get to Peter before he was born, like the others, before he was even conceived. That’s why there were no records of his other victims. Other than Gordon Quarendon. He had been the first
to disappear after Ron Koch. Poor old irritating Gordon—his crib death had been the botched attempt of a beginner.

  He felt it again: the topsy-turvy roll of his consciousness, the rug of his world was being pulled out from under him—the fabric of this version of things was like cotton candy melting on his tongue. Shit. He’s back there now, isn’t he? The “Then” of Peter’s past was being revised at this very moment; the probability wave of his own existence was fading into actuarial oblivion.

  He had to do something, fast. Get back there somehow. But not to a point in time during his own life span. He had to touch down before his own conception. Just like Simon. That was Simon’s modus operandi of course; he was aiming for the moment of Peter’s conception. The “date” he had mentioned—a date with his mom. The date of his conception, some time in 1962—it had to be.

  Peter pulled the wrapping off the hypodermic—he’d found a box of them on a shelf in the cupboard over the sink—and did what he could to remember all the times he had been given an injection, nurses in doctors’ offices when he was a kid; scenes of druggies and interrogators in spy movies.

  He took the cap off the bottle and punctured the seal with the point, drew back the plunger (how much of the stuff Jeff had given him the last time he couldn’t remember). He filled it as far as it would go, then flicked at it with his finger to get the bubbles out, pushed at the plunger till it gave a little bit back—a drop of it ended up on the front of his T-shirt. So you don’t end up killing yourself. A bubble in the bloodstream like a torpedo to the brain supposedly. As if it really mattered anymore.

  But this stuff was heading for the muscle, the thigh muscle. Like his diabetic friend, a fellow cast member back when he was doing Les Miz. He’d watched him do this in the dressing room a few times; he undid his belt, dropped his pants, and sat down in a chair—fuck the alcohol, just get on with it. He jabbed his thigh, and slowly injected the drug: a sweet pain, a delicious pain, he thought. Physical pain insignificant now, immaterial—more like an old trusty friend.