A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  He went back into the lab and lay back on the couch. He tried to relax but it all seemed so futile: he was empty-handed. Here he was, all pumped up in every sense of the word, lying here with no PL, no crutch, no prop to help him through his stage business.

  Opening night with the script still not written—one of his recurring dreams back when he was doing repertory for room and board. All dressed up with no place to go.

  And where do you want to go? Where is Simon right now? Or better yet, where does he want to go? What’s he up to?

  Peter had no idea. He was adopted. Nineteen sixty-two or thereabouts—that’s all he had to go on. His real father had died when he was six. His real mother was a fiction as far as he knew—a concoction of myth and hearsay.

  And how could Simon possibly know who his real mother was? What a joke. Simon was after him for all the stuff he did remember, and that one crucial piece of information was nowhere to be found in any of the myriad of memory strands woven through his brain cells. Memories of not knowing: that was something else again. Cleveland. The distant trauma of the game in the park. Go find your mother.

  The pain in the palm of his hand flared up again—he was clenching his fist, his nails were digging into his palms. You’re supposed to relax, for God’s sake.

  I want my mom, my real mom. What was that song? “Mother.” Who had written that? The Beatles, who were no more. (Not in this world, anyway. He had done them in somehow, according to Simon.) No. Just one of the Beatles had written it: John Lennon.

  His body fell away from him, dropped through the membrane of the water bed. Right through it—pulled by a gravity that had nothing to do with the mass of the planet he was on. His soul broke free, or his spirit, his virtual self, his astral, ethereal self. All of him was ousted for a moment, then snatched back into the physical grid of his body again. His soul had found a comfortable rut in the road—here in the time line of Jenny and Passmore College. He couldn’t go anywhere; had no map, no steering wheel. No gas. No lodestone.

  Show me the way, Lord. I come to you empty-handed. A hand with a cut down the middle of it. He sat up; he was completely lucid again, back in the PsiberTech lab.

  Go find your mother, go find your mother. How? How? How? Track her in the present? Use his Private Eye? He didn’t have time for that. He needed something that belonged to her, something physical to make the connection. A psychometric link. Something she had once owned, or just touched at some point in her life, even for a few moments, a few days . . . or nine months.

  “Go find your mother. Go find your mother.” His dad’s voice. He could hear it now, the slurred, sweet breath—slovenly consonanted, like Simon’s had been on the phone.

  He was overcome with the need to hold and touch this woman he had never met, hold and hug and touch. To find her in the crowd of a Cleveland supermarket . . .

  It was there on the tip of his tongue. Figure it out—like a message in a bottle. For a few seconds or a few months . . .

  That was it. I own something of hers—I always have. The best link in the house: me.

  He lay back down on the couch again and listened to his father’s voice, the droning somnambulant chant: Go find your mother, go find your mother . . . He wrapped himself in his arms as best he could—the pain again in the palm of his hand—and focused on the duality of himself: You can be object and subject all in one, an actor and a character in a play at the same time—and let himself fall into alpha, and beyond that.

  The drug was the octane he needed, the lubricant for his soul and his body to fall away from the PsiberTech lab, and Passmore College and Iowa; away from a place and time where a woman who cared about him was sleeping in his bed—dreaming about him now. Jenny in a single-engine plane taking him on a camping trip, the pontoon dipping, dipping . . .

  . . . down and up all at once into the convoluted eddies and vortices of the ether; he was puncturing pleats and seams of times and places he had no business passing through.

  Go find your mother

  Go find your mother

  Go find your mother

  . . . into hot sunlight that dazzled him, blinded him with a crushing weight, a tingling burn as he hit a wall of transgression. Not here. You should not be here . . . then up out of the trespassing, up into the ether again . . . forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that . . .

  (. . . a drowning for a moment; in a cauldron of amniotic gray. An umbilical drowning—in two places at the same time; in the same time at two places—that’s impossible, unforgivable), then a song—words through the liquid shroud: “The Rhythm of the Rain.”

  Not here, back, back, back . . .

  . . . down through the bright blue sky into the heat and breeze of a California summer. Back to July 15, 1962. To the beach just north of the pier at the foot of Colorado Avenue.

  Kids and teenagers in a pre-carcinoma sunshine. (Ozone to spare here—our planet’s natural sunblock.) Old retired folks at ease with their tired selves here on the edge of the promised land, the promised sea. Where coconut oil deep-fried slick young thighs and Annette Funicello puppy-fat arms into a tropical, hot dog mahogany.

  Surfboards like Stonehenge-scale sharks’ teeth. Beach towels, acres of them. Teased hair and sunglasses, and portable transistor radios: boxes the size of lunch buckets with “Ten Transistor” spelled out in metallic italic on fabric grillwork. The hits just keep on coming: Roy Orbison singing “Dream Baby,” then Neil Sedaka’s multitracked whine: “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

  Peter found himself on the boardwalk of a pier, at a railing looking out over a beach, a vast ocean. The sun was in his eyes and the pit of his stomach, it felt like; it was burning its way like a lit fuse down to his feet. He was still hugging himself, his own ribs under the thin T-shirt. Me here, in the flesh—where the hell am I?

  On a pier beside a shoreline. Ocean air and the screech of seagulls, the slap and wash of the surf against the piles. He was looking out on a view of near-distant coastline, and sand bluffs off to his right. Palm trees, white stucco facades, fancy hotels—beyond that, a downtown of some kind. He looked down the length of the pier—park benches every so often, a row of hot dog stands and amusements, a sign above a birthday cake of a building, a folly from the last century, it looked like—Persian minarets and filigreed, gingerbread detailing: LA MONICA BALLROOM, it said. La Monica.

  Santa Monica, asshole. You’re on the coast, man.

  Simon right there in the crowd—among men wearing suit pants and starched, short-sleeved white shirts, fedoras, and tortoiseshell sunglasses. Like the people in the Dallas footage of the day Kennedy was shot. He had an ice cream cone in his hand; he was licking it and smiling at the same time. He gave Peter a wave that ended with an index finger pointing up into the clear blue sky.

  California—the clear blue yonder, man. Home of the young and the restless. The hip and the wannabe hip . . . His words in his head again, right next to his inner ear.

  He came toward him, licking his melting cone, some of it fell onto his white cotton shirt. He was dressed just like the other people here too—a pair of plain gray slacks, black dress shoes. He looked like an off-duty secret agent. His sleeves were rolled up and the buttons were undone halfway down his chest, as if he were trying to soak up some rays.

  His small, gold medallion was showing and it glinted in the bright sunlight every now and then as he walked—stumbled really. He looked half-cut to Peter.

  “Nineteen sixty-two, Pete. July fifteenth, to be exact. Happy Conception Day.”

  Simon held out his hand in greeting. His right hand: the one without the cone. Peter moved further down the railing. He didn’t want to get anywhere near him.

  “How the fuck did you get here?” He shook his head and looked out over the water, and tossed what was left of his ice cream over the side. He took a place on the rail a few yards away from Peter and looked back toward the beach, at the bathers and surfers, the people strolling along the water’s edge. “And why? That’s wha
t kills me. What’s the point? Shit, you’ve got like, two, three, maybe four hours tops and that’s it. Your mother’s about to get laid, Peter. And you’re about to get screwed.”

  He stood up straight and turned back toward the boardwalk. He sat down on the nearest bench. “Haven’t you had enough of all this shit, all the crap we’ve shared, the memories—isn’t that romantic, now that I think about it. Me and you.” He smiled and shook his head. His hand came up to wipe his lips.

  He turned around to face Peter then. “How about this. We can get out of here, find a safe place, you know, work out a deal. Come up with some kind of compromise, a truce. Let bygones be bygones. There’s plenty out there for both of us, right?”

  “A ‘deal.’ You’ve killed people, Simon. Where’s the romance in that? Jesus. Have you kept score? What is it? Four? I’m supposed to be number five, right? You killed Pam—”

  They both felt a rippling shudder pass through the timbers and pylons of the pier. The railing seemed to melt beneath Peter’s arm for a second. As if his grasp of the place, and the time, were slipping from him.

  Simon got to his feet. “Wow, did you feel that! Don’t swear it, man. We’re in earthquake country, remember.” None of the other people on the boardwalk seemed to have noticed anything.

  “You’re a serial killer, Simon. How does that grab you?”

  “I didn’t kill them—not really. They never existed. They were never alive in the first place. Well, except for Gordon; I miscalculated with Gordon.” He gave Peter a weary smile. “I guess I got the numbers wrong. And that other guy, what was his name? The one in Minneapolis—” He stopped in mid-sentence and they both turned, then, to the beach, to the sound of someone’s laughter. The voice seemed to catch in Peter’s throat—it seemed so familiar—and echo through his chest. And Simon was suddenly caught up again in the familiar scene below—the one he had witnessed before.

  Peter watched as if he were at the movies, watched his mother calling out to a young man standing on shore; he sensed right away that it was his father. She stood up out of the water, shook her hair back from her face, and smiled up into the sky. She started for the beach through knee-high waves with her head down now, tipped to one side as she wrung out her long hair.

  “Bimbo City, man. God, how embarrassing for you. Your mom’s a bimbo. A bit of a tart too, if you ask me. In a couple of hours she’s going to put out for that guy down there. Can you believe it?”

  The tanned kid with his dark, slicked-back hair was standing there in the sand with his arms crossed watching her. He was smoking or just holding a cigarette—Peter couldn’t tell. My God, that is my father, he realized then, in the pit of his stomach. The touch, the scent of him all coming back; the sound and feel of his voice near his face.

  They were talking now, joking around, testing each other, marking out the boundary lines—caught up in the parry and thrust of courtship. He didn’t have to be a mind reader to see what was happening. Where it was heading.

  Another song on the radio now: “Palisades Park.”

  Sharon Tate would be nineteen right about this time. The hair the same. These were Simon’s thoughts impinging on Peter’s as they both watched his mother tip her head to one side, drying her hair like the sign language gesture for going to sleep—two hands praying beside the head. Patting it down to bring it back to the natural blond. Blond like Sharon Tate. Manson fodder Sharon Tate, the love of my half-life. Why did I bother? Charles and his royal family could have gone on to greater things. More interesting things.

  “The lips not the same, though. They’re a bit thinner; and the nose is slightly larger, more Streisandesque than I like, but passable. Nice body, though, don’t you think? If you take into account how out of shape chicks are back here in the sixties.” This last part was spoken. Peter looked over at him and his lips were moving. The blue sky suddenly shifted to red and green, indigo, now gray-to-pitch-black. It strobed and flashed like night lightning.

  There was another tremor; the pier began to groan and sway. And for a second the sea turned into a gray-black oil slick.

  The guy who was Peter’s father picked up the radio and took possession of the song: it was the Beach Boys doing “Surfin’ Safari.” His long toes were in the sand now, shuffling, digging in as he did a bobbing, bird head mating-dance with his arms out, faking the “Swim” or “Watusi” or whatever it was. He was letting everyone know it was tongue in cheek—a parody, and if he wanted to, in the right circumstances, with his good clothes on, not just his tight satin swimsuit, he could dance up a storm.

  He had taken the radio from beside the purse of another young woman who was sunning herself on the beach. She sat up and took off her sunglasses as Peter’s dad-to-be danced his way off toward the pier. He worked through islands of towels and red metal Coca-Cola coolers, the clusters of sunbathers and volleyball players, tiny kids scurrying across the sand to the water—through all that toward the pier, the music still with him; it was his own personal soundtrack now.

  “Oh-oh. There’s my cue, man. Like I told you, I have a date. I’ve got to play chaperone, if you know what I mean. Premarital sex being the curse of modern society and all. Un-fucking-American, if you ask me.” Simon started to move away from the railing, not back along the boardwalk to the amusements and the way down to the beach, but farther out toward the end of the pier. It didn’t make any sense to Peter. So he just followed him farther out along the pier; he didn’t know what else he could do, but he had to do something. Watch him, at least, see if he could screw up his plans without getting too close to his parents.

  The weight of it all was hobbling him again, the import of what was at stake here. His life line looming on the horizon like a rising sun. That walking-through-quicksand feeling. A wave of nausea rippled through his gut and his field of vision clouded like bad-reception TV snow.

  The sky was green now, all the time, and the sound of the seagulls had become a deep, rasping roar. It could be the drug, he thought. It’s wearing off, or the dose was too strong. But he sensed that Simon was aware of the changes too.

  Simon was almost at the end of the pier. Peter could do nothing but follow him; he was improvising now, while at the same time he sensed that Simon had a plan of action—the only thing he could think of right then was to get in the way of it. He decided that he was ready to grab him when the time was right—wring his fucking neck, no matter what the consequences.

  Peter caught up to him and the boardwalk shuddered again; Simon lost his balance for a second. The steady breeze whipped at Simon’s open shirt. He was leaning over the side, breathing hard and squinting into the distance. His medal ticked against the rail.

  Peter could see his ribs, how scrawny his chest was. He looked malnourished. There was a rash around one corner of his mouth.

  “What are you up to, Peter? Give me a break—” He sniffed and blinked away dust as the wind threw up a swirl of litter. He coughed and said, “Do you think you can keep me here till Little Miss Gidgit gets it on with Daddy-O down there? Is that what you’re trying to do? What’s the point? I can stay here as long as I want. You can’t. I give you maybe two more hours and you’re doing a Ron Koch; you’ll be in two places at once, two times at once. Implode City, man. Either way it’s game over. I just have to weather this shit and you’ll be gone.” He sat down on the bench and took a deep breath; his eyes were closed. “I can lie on the beach in the warm Santa Monica sunshine for the rest of my life, man—what little I’ve got left. Seven years till my own conception.” The sun came out then, as if he had willed it out of the pure blue sky—the way the sky should be, had been when Peter first got there. And he stood up then, energized somehow, by what he had said—the vision of it.

  He had set it all in motion, Peter realized then. Set the stage for his own version of things. Peter felt the weight of the world, hundreds of worlds (worlds and futures that would never be), fall on his shoulders.

  Simon looked at his watch, then farther down the pier
toward the La Monica Ballroom. “Here he comes. Right on time.” A young man was walking toward them. He was wearing a sport jacket with an open shirt folded out over the collar. “That’s your uncle, Pete. How would you like to meet him?”

  Peter felt the world, the whole planet start to swing through his field of vision, the sea like the rim of a blue plate special, the breeze vortexing into a dust devil that spanned the girth of the earth . . . darkness and weight and lightness; and white searing light all at once. His family tree tendrilled around him, closing around his throat.

  Peter lunged at him, but Simon was already out of reach; he’d climbed up onto the bench. Peter ended up on his knees. He was trapped; the guy down the pier was getting closer. Simon was doing a little soft-shoe dance and then the Swim, or whatever it was the guy on the beach, Peter’s father, had done. His outstretched arms doing airplane wings in the steady breeze.

  “This is a great time to be alive—the Kennedy era, man! Pre-Manson, pre-Vietnam . . . once you’re out of the way I can hang out here and wait for the Beatles to come to town. I can play the stock market,” he said between moves. “Short sell November twenty-second, 1963. You know that date, man?” Peter shook his head; he could hardly stay on his feet. “Assassination day. Kennedy.” (He made a shooting noise, then blew across his gun-barrel index finger.) “Kaput. And, uh, that was the day old Aldous Huxley kicked the bucket too. He was high at the time, by the way—on LSD. And the Beatles. Their second album came out that day. Shit, you want to survive in this world, you’ve got to know your history or repeat it! Repeat, repeat, repeat. Hah! No pun intended, man—” He started clapping his hands and singing something Peter couldn’t make out.