A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  Gordon Quarendon was a dowser, a water diviner. Peter couldn’t remember what he called himself; out of all the crap that came out of his mouth, if that crucial bit of information was buried in there somewhere, he couldn’t for the life of him remember if he’d actually spelled it out—his wife left behind sick at home somewhere north of Seattle: endometriosis. His cat “Baker,” named after his first car, a car he found at a wrecker’s yard when he was fifteen, a Studebaker. The cat that showed up on his front porch the day he sold it. Everything had meaning to Gordon. Numerological, meteorological. The letters of the cat’s name adding up to “1,” which meant “independence”—perfect for a cat that came and went as it pleased.

  Gordon carried an old leather suitcase full of his divining rods, his “devices,” he called them. He had names for them too—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—he’d “Christened” them. It was an old medieval tradition among dowsers to ward off evil spirits, he said. The only time his mouth stopped moving was when he had one of his devices in his hands: eyes scrunched up, his graying black hair pulled back in a ponytail, his Birkenstocks shuffling across the floor as if what he was looking for would bolt if it got wind of him (Anita had hidden one of her earrings under the carpet). The one he used for his little demonstration was a double strip of copper he held as if grabbing a bull by the horns, the joined end of it jerking and twitching its way to the target—water, oil, minerals, misplaced pipelines. He actually made a modest living at it, he said. He came up with numbers again—gross income, net income. Desperate for congratulations.

  “I worked on a child abduction case one time, out near Everett—that’s just north of Seattle. I was called in by the county sheriff’s office. A little girl had gone missing and I found her shoe in a pile of leaves out behind the factory where her mother worked. Two days later they had enough to charge a guy in shipping. He finally told them where her body was. I’m sort of glad all I came up with was the shoe.”

  Gordon, like most people, was a different person when he was drunk. One night Larry took him into town and someone on the staff had to go out and collect them from a bar outside Philipsburg. Larry had passed out in the car, and though Gordon came into the lounge smelling of rum, he was lucid enough to decide he needed coffee. The silence had been the eerie part: drunk, he had nothing much to say. His shuffling walk was a precise choreography against gravity, his long bony features were haggard, frozen; as if the alcohol had dissolved some connection between his mouth and his brain. Or filled his neediness with something else.

  The wind could be seen today, the palms strung out to dry in it, waiting for the rain, the sea a dark living thing, conspiring with the heavy clouds. Peter had been here three weeks now, watching this beach and this sky with its distant pyramidal hump of Saba pointing to it. Some days the island was no more than a faint murmur of a smudge on the horizon, others a believable chunk of something—gray and scarred, sticky with streaming clouds.

  Learning to do things they insisted were real, quantifiable phenomena. It’s as if they gathered all the recruits together every morning to reassure them that the orange ball setting in the western sky was the sun, and yes, it will reappear in the east tomorrow morning. They treated them like dubious shareholders, it seemed to Peter.

  In a session with Jane Franklin and Mike Blenheim he had succeeded in describing a room in an office building in Chicago. The fountain pen they gave him to hold on to had belonged to the poor sucker who had spent thirty years working behind the desk. Peter had supposedly described it in all its dilapidated detail. “Psychometry,” they called it. He had always assumed everyone could do it. You touch something, you feel something else, some place else; things had moods attached to them. “Meta-texture,” the techie called it. No ganzfeld this time; they just told him to lie back and relax, aim for the hypnagogic. The patches they put on his head plotted his poor brain’s tumble into alpha and beyond, supposedly. His “signature” was “atypical,” Blenheim said, raising his eyebrows with the first syllable. Peter couldn’t see eyebrows—Blenheim had blond eyebrows that looked like wrinkled skin.

  He came out of it in a cold sweat, with an excruciating shaft of pain running down his left arm. They had pulled the pen out of his hand—later Jane said she and Blenheim had to pry his fingers apart—and the pain stopped. He opened his eyes and Ms. Franklin was leaning over him. The lights were on now, dazzling him; a cluster of gold rings hung from each ear; a worried frown broke the perfect mahogany hemisphere of her forehead. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, I guess.” He felt lousy but he didn’t know how lousy he should feel before admitting it.

  “You stopped describing your surroundings and started reacting to something. Can you remember what that was?” Blenheim had a deep voice that rumbled out of him from somewhere near the ground. He was big, even for his voice, but he seemed to be far away. He was breathing heavily and Peter wondered if Blenheim had had to hold him down at some point.

  “I just felt panic, and then the pain, nausea, this weight on me—like someone sitting on my chest.”

  “You were having a heart attack,” Jane said. She turned to the computer screen on the table beside the couch. Numbers. In columns. There was a flashing dot with the word DISCONNECT next to it. The electrodes had come undone in the scuffle.

  “More like a virtual heart attack, really,” Blenheim said. “You were just reacting to a heart attack. The man who owned the pen died of heart failure.”

  “Can you die from a virtual heart attack?”

  Blenheim said, “No. No, I don’t think so,” just as Ms. Franklin was saying, “Yes, you can.”

  “It’s good to know I’m in the hands of experts.”

  9

  Pictures and a thousand words

  Their weekly rap session in the library. Pete in a bucket of a chair like all the others; they sat in a ragged arc around the big screen TV that was always on but no one ever seemed to be watching. It was blank today. Off. A dark day. In front of it a small table with a jug of ice water and a couple of glasses. An easel—sleek, collapsible aluminum like some statement about technology: the old and the new. A creature on three legs, Giacometti-slender.

  “We stick to basics here—we don’t agonize over the veracity of psi phenomena—their notorious elusiveness,” Eli Thornquist was saying now that all the recruits—five of them so far—had settled into their comfy chairs. “We start with the premise that the paranormal is just that: para-normal, beside the normal. We’re not going to be wasting any time dithering over ways of proving it to the world, making it presentable to so-called traditional science. We’ll leave that to the statisticians, the meta-analysts. It’s a club we don’t care if we’re invited to join anymore—to paraphrase Groucho Marx—or is it Woody Allen? Anyway, psi is a tool like a computer—we don’t have to know how it does what it does. We just use it.” Blenheim came in carrying what looked like about a dozen large display cards. He quietly closed the door and telegraphed his apologies with a show of delicate footsteps.

  “There are three bodies, the physical, the ethereal, and the spiritual of course—what the Hindu faith considers the true self, what survives death. Seven, according to the Theosophists. The physical you all know about, the one we feed and purge and preen. The ethereal is much like the physical body in a way, it’s sort of an electromagnetic simulacrum of the physical body; it bleeds out about five to ten inches from the physical—this is the body traditionally read by healers, shamans, clairvoyants—the energy vortices emanating from the seven chakras. Some of you can see this energy quite readily, I understand, the colors of it, the shifting patterns of the so-called aura. Others, like myself, have enough trouble reading the morning paper.” Anita, who was sitting next to Ron Koch, laughed a little bit; Larry, who was prone to such things, picked up on it and took the opportunity to wheeze his laugh into a series of graphic coughs. “You can be trained to do it, I understand. And that’s what we’re here to do—teach all the things we’ve been talkin
g about and more if we can, exploit what we know and go beyond experimental science. Turn it into profitable technology. But psi phenomena are so unpredictable, so capricious. You all have a talent for this sort of thing; we know that already—but that’s not enough anymore. None of you show any real consistency. And if we’re going to make money around here we need to be consistent. Where was I?

  “Okay—” He signaled Blenheim somehow, who started sorting through the display cards. “J. B. Rhine’s pioneering lab work with ESP cards. Observation theories about feedback loops working retroactively. Targ and Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments at Stanford, ganzfeld techniques; Schmidt’s work with PK, psychokinesis—mind-over-matter to the great unwashed; Ingo Swann’s formalization of RV technique; random number generators, all the classified stuff that’s coming out in the popular press, tabloid TV . . . psychic espionage—consider it old hat. It’s all in your reading material if you care to bone up on it. But that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here to help us make money, not history.” Blenheim had given up; his visual aids obviously couldn’t keep up with this torrent of data; he’d barely had a chance to come up with Rhine’s famous ESP cards—the five symbols like a comic-strip rendition of cuss words.

  “There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence about gifted individuals who are able to remote view at great distances—‘traveling clairvoyance,’ it used to be called in the nineteenth century. Astral projection, out-of-body experiences, OBE’s—different labels, but all the same thing really. We have a good twenty years’ worth of formal experiments to back this up—look at the data in your kit there. We also have evidence of people who have actually been able to manifest their corporeal selves at a distance, a form of it anyway. More substantial than a mere apparition. In some cases a full-blown ectoplasmic replica of themselves, I suppose. A materialization. Blenheim is more versed in the theory behind it all than I am. He’d be more than glad to fill you in, but not now, please. My third eye tends to glaze over.” Anita laughed again and the rest of them smiled and shifted in their bucket armchairs. “But there are limits, fundamental limits, and that’s what I want to focus on today.

  “Now let’s see . . . Mike? Number fourteen, please. Yes, thank you. ‘Remote Viewing into the Past’ . . . there’s a lot here, a truckload of hard evidence for it. As you can see, years of government ‘tasking,’ as they used to call it back at Fort Meade—all out in the open now . . . some of the really interesting stuff is still classified. But it’s a relatively benign endeavor, thank goodness.” He stepped forward, gathering steam, looking some of them straight in the eye. “Because nothing’s changed, you see—just observed. But the prospect of actually interfering with the past in some way, well that’s a tenfold difference; a whole other ball game—”

  “What if it did happen? What if one of us changed something? We wouldn’t know anyway, would we?” Gordon Quarendon said, interrupting him. His ponytail was tied in a topknot today; it made him look like some gangling, exotic bird. “If it happened it happened.”

  “But you can’t do it for the same reason.” Anita this time, frowning at Quarendon; she seemed irritated by his presence as much as his words. “If it’s already part of history, how can you change it?”

  “Well you’re both right, in a way. That’s the beauty of paradoxes; no one wins the argument.” Thornquist with his tilted smile. “Let’s just say it’s the universe that wins out in the end—always does; it will follow the path of least resistance, do anything to heal a breach in the flow of things. But that’s for all you philosophy majors to work out.”

  He moved over to the easel, where Blenheim had parked himself on the edge of the table beside his stack of large display boards. Thornquist said something under his breath and Blenheim came up with what looked like a blowup of an old photograph. A group portrait of men dressed like Charles Dickens—high, stiff collars, a few top hats—casually posed in a forest setting.

  “This is the closest we’ve come to any evidence of direct interference. It’s a photograph taken by a man named Carl Ferdinand Stelzner at 5:00 P.M. on May 28, 1843, in Hamburg, Germany. It’s known as The Hamburg Art Club’s Outing. Now look at this one.”

  Blenheim put another card up in front of it. At first glance, it looked just like the other one. “Look closely at the man standing in the back row, second from the left. He wasn’t in the other one. And his jacket’s wrong; the way the collar’s constructed—that wasn’t even conceived of till eighteen ninety-something. This picture has always been like that; as far as we can tell. It wasn’t discovered till just recently. That’s why it’s been allowed to exist to some extent, held in some kind of causal suspended animation since it was taken. That’s the theory, anyway—according to people like Blenheim here.” Mike Blenheim nodded for the audience—it was a bow, really—from the waist, as if it were the end of a recital.

  “If it had been disseminated along with the first one, back in the last century, I doubt that this aberration in causality would ever have survived. Something would have brought about its demise. The universe again—healing itself. The universe would have swallowed it up somehow. We don’t know that for certain, of course. It’s just a hypothesis at this point. And by it’s very nature it would tend to be impossible to substantiate.

  “Anyway, poor Mr. Stelzner died young from the chemicals he used to process his pictures and this photograph showed up last year among the effects of his great-granddaughter.

  “Someone in the recent past has done this—or someone in the relatively benign future, I guess you’d say. This thing was reproduced in a recent Sotheby’s catalog so it’s history now, rehashed history, I suppose. What is it, Blenheim? Already collapsed into reality? Like Schrödinger’s cat? Quantum physics can explain it—or Blenheim here. Not me.”

  Peter looked at the photograph with the extra figure standing second from the left and couldn’t help thinking he looked familiar; familiar the way a supporting actor in a low-budget film looks familiar. Nameless, placeless, but located somewhere in the recesses of memory. It didn’t make sense if what Eli had been saying was true—but then again paradoxes by their very nature weren’t supposed to make sense; they just were—and weren’t. At the same time.

  10

  Llewelyn is a naughty boy.

  At first she thought she had ended up at the American Society for Psychical Research by accident. Pam’s feet had taken her up Broadway from Lincoln Center to a coffee shop near the Beacon Hotel—her feet and some vague memory about cheese Danish. She loved cheese Danish. She started to open the door to the place, then changed her mind, crossing the road against the light and heading east along West Seventy-third instead. Something was calling out to her—a thin, scratchy whisper that grew louder the closer she got to the park.

  All week her apprehensions about the Calliope job interview had been chewing at her: They’re going to ask me about my job experience or something and I’ll have nothing to show them. They’ll want to know about fucking “Fortune 2000”—psychic phone line shit at six bucks an hour for telling these poor suckers they’re going to meet Cindy Crawford in the subway and a day later win the New York State Lottery, crap like that—anything to keep them on the line. Then she’d get a flash of something genuine—this pathetic creature on the other end of the line like a rabbit in a leg trap, doomed, doomed. You weren’t supposed to tell them bad stuff. They wouldn’t call back if you told them the bad stuff . . . But when she climbed the few steps and entered this beautiful old building just up from the park her worries fell away like dead skin. The weight of it all just lifted from her shoulders like a spooked flock of deadbeat pigeons.

  She entered the lobby and found herself asking directions to the library. She made her own way from there—she knew exactly where to go—up two flights of stairs to the archives. The sign said EMPLOYEES ONLY: DOCUMENTS; JOURNALS; PERSONAL PAPERS but she walked right in: old book smells; she liked that. Much better than cheese Danish.

  It just spoke to her,
boom-box loud: “Over here!” That’s what it felt like—a deep, James Earl Jones voice calling down to her from a shelf high above the transom in among some bulging accordion file folders and leather-bound journals. She climbed up on the soft seat of a swivel chair. It felt as if she were standing up in a canoe, and as she reached up she lost her balance for a second; the book fell on top of her, through a cloud of sweet, dry dust.

  A diary, it looked like—with a pebble-grained cover worn at the corners to nubs of brown cardboard, a mended spine of black fabric tape. Hand-scripted on the front of it were the words “James L. Rathburn, Ph.D: Notes and Observations—Seances and Spirit Circles, 1908–1923 . . .”

  Touching it, she felt this little brain-shift thing that happened sometimes, slurring everything—that’s the only way she could explain it. The turned pages tickled her fingers, fluttering against her palm like a caged cricket. She closed the book and then her eyes till the pictures, the smells subsided—the screed of voices. She sat down in the chair and chewed at her thumbnail for a second.

  It all came back to her then, the weird dream—or rather half dream—she’d had the night before, and she knew why she was there. What had drawn her to this place. She had drunk a whole bottle of wine and fell asleep with her headphones on, with her CD player stuck on “repeat,” playing one song over and over again. She remembered, now, how the pulsing beat had pulled her down into a tranced funk, a strangled fitful place on the borders of sleep that had opened up into one of her out-of-body experiences, the kind that took her cruising through the dark eerie place she’d first discovered as a very young child.

  The wine had put her in a goofy shit-disturbing mood and she’d ended up trying to dance to the music flat on her back in the middle of the floor. And float out of her body at the same time—doing a sort of OBE jive. Cruising the “Never-Ever-Land,” snapping her astral fingers, looking for action.