A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  Her hand came up to her forehead and old Bill Ryan—Simon could see his mind working, his body language: just the look on her face was making him change his mind—left the store without saying another word.

  Simon had been away from his body for forty minutes or so and when he came to, he was in a cold sweat. He sat on the bed for a minute; his hands trembling, his mouth dry. He got up and went out to the kitchen, and when he came back he realized the book about Bill Ryan’s treasure hunt had disappeared from his nightstand. On the coffee table in the living room he found another paperback—one about a man who had uncovered some of John Dillinger’s loot in a tourist cabin near Indianapolis. He’d never seen the thing before, but at the same time he felt he knew pretty well what the book was all about. As if he’d read it already. The two experiences overlapping: reading the Ryan book; reading the one about Dillinger. “Palimpsest” came to mind; the word “palimpsest.” He couldn’t quite remember what it meant, but it happened sometimes—words coming to him like that, uninvited. Party-crashing words.

  An hour later when he felt up to it, he did a real-time remote viewing of the old adobe church. No corporeal manifestation this time, just a ghostly glide-by. The place was still isolated, more devastated than it had been back in 1961, the walls completely gone now, dissolved by the rain and wind. But there they were: the three bags of gold, where they’d been since God-only-knew when, buried near the foundation, waiting for him to go out there just like a regular down-to-earth treasure hunter with a real-time rented four-by-four and a real-time, solid, shit-disturbing shovel.

  But when he heard Gordon say something about going to let Jane or Eli in on what he was up to, Simon slowly closed his Wired magazine, got up from his chair, and left. Not a word. Just a thought: I wish you’d never been born.

  Jane especially. He didn’t want him talking to her. He liked to think Jane thought he was a pretty nice guy; it was a self-image thing—how he saw himself in her eyes. And he wasn’t going to let this fucking asshole screw things up at this stage of the game—get him fired. He needed the paycheck. He wouldn’t be able to collect his gold without his paycheck.

  And he liked it here. He was having the best time of his life.

  There’s an idle threat you hear in movies all the time, usually from thugs with knives in their hands saying it to other thugs played by actors who always disappeared before the end of the first reel: “I’m gonna make you wish you’d never been born.” This had always puzzled Simon; because it was something a guy like Heidegger would have chewed at for hours. The notion that the desire for Non-being could supersede Being no matter how painful it was. Simon had never been into booze or mind-numbing drugs of any sort—maybe that’s why he couldn’t figure it out. As far as he was concerned, the real injury was in the numbness, the oblivion.

  His girlfriend before Betty had liked to read books by Heidegger, and that other one, Wittgenstein—wear books by these guys was more like it. She kept one in her purse to read in the lobbies of theaters, or she would leave it spread-eagled next to her cappuccino in museum cafeterias while she strolled over for one more little brown packet of unrefined sugar.

  He was out in the hall now, but Gordon, always one to fill the air with words, couldn’t resist a final volley: “Larry’s got footage.”

  “What do you mean, footage?”

  “Stuff he knows is not his, ’cause when it’s coming through, the brain-wave signature changes on the scope.”

  “What kind of stuff. Jesus—”

  “A kid on a bike, an old car from the fifties, a dolly-shot kind of view of a dime store or something like that; some stuff that looked like a bomb site, a few bags of gold nuggets or something—that sound familiar?”

  Simon turned without saying anything and headed down the hall; and this time Gordon let him go. He passed the door to Jane’s office and felt something through it—or sent something through it—because it opened as he got close to it. Jane in her white lab coat today, as if she were an intern doing rounds. Not looking at him, letting him go his own way. Not smiling at him like she usually did.

  I wish you’d never been born.

  He realized then that he was going to have to pull the plug on poor old Larry too. All of them maybe. Just to get a little slack, that’s all he wanted. Just cut me a little slack.

  So he could go about his business gathering together what was rightfully his.

  Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of—well, just the pursuit, for now. The Happiness would come later.

  28

  . . . dousing the flaming dowser

  I’d be doing the world a favor—one less mouth sucking back veggie Big Macs and cases of Fruitopia, or whatever that New Age Coca-Cola piss is called; one less asshole to clean up after. Simon heading for his apartment, his Wired magazine a tube of bruised paper. Slapping. Things in his way.

  Nineteen fifty-six. Memphis, Tennessee. Well, Bartlett, Tennessee, really—close enough. Down the road a piece. The year Elvis did his screen test for Paramount—a scene from The Rainmaker. Lost footage; no one knew where it was. Maybe they should send Larry back there to reshoot it. Simon locked his door, closed the blinds, unplugged the phone; he checked the door again, telling himself out loud it was locked. He remembered the dehydration problem and went back out to the kitchen for a bottle of mineral water.

  He lay down on the bed and tried to relax, telling himself it wasn’t murder, it was contraception. Gordon Quarendon should never have been born. No one could argue with that, except maybe his cat.

  February 4, 1956. His parents’ wedding night in a hotel just outside Memphis. Retro-contraception. The guy had told him this the day he’d shown him how to dowse maps—how he’d been conceived on his parents’ wedding night—and for some reason this piece of trivia had actually taken root in Simon’s memory. Serendipity. Thank you, Jesus.

  There was a wind this time, in the ether; he had never felt anything like it before. Eddies, currents, slowing him down, making him aware of the process—the getting there, the getting back. His body lost in the confusion. No kinetic memory working for him this time, his arms and legs disoriented, where his tongue should be, his spleen—just this bulging approximation of himself in transition, fighting something, tracking through something. Akimbo. Nothing like the graceful, effortless dive he was used to. I am too angry to be doing this; I should have waited, calmed down a bit. What’s the rush anyway? Now, next week—the departure date’s irrelevant.

  A sudden shock wave of consequence, a crease in the fabric of things. A deflection. Currents pulling him away—from himself, from who he was, what he was, is, and ever shall be. Pace it. Turn it into a song. Sing yourself through it: “Blackbird”—a one-and-a-half pike.

  A pulling back, a recovery; angle of incidence equals angle of—the leading edge of the projectile that was Simon Hayward breaking through the meniscus. A fish out of water . . .

  Simon with a body now, a concoction of a body, strobing—massive, massless, massive, massless—a rhythmic raspberry of on/off, on/off existence. Stuttering into a solid here and now. But where the fuck was he? In a room that looked nothing like a bridal suite, no couple humping in a froufrou bed. No discarded tuxedo jacket with its dosimeter-like boutonniere wilted from exposure to all that good cheer: reception lines and flashbulbs.

  This was the deal. He had planned to show up just as Gordon came to pass, came to be. Just before his spry young dad, blindsided by cheap champagne and pancreas-killing wedding cake, would do the dirty deed. He was going to grab the guy by the balls or something—he hadn’t really worked it out. Get into his head; or her head—make her think the bridegroom smelled like a potato on the verge of becoming a maggot day-care center. Deconstruct his erection to start with, and make sure it stayed that way. It would have been relatively easy—just a matter of timing.

  Which brought him back to the situation at hand: something had brought him here, something had deflected him away from his target—to this place that smelled
like talcum powder and leftover broccoli. A branch of his own family tree in the way, maybe, somehow interwoven with Gordon and his parents. There was something about the night of Gordon’s conception that was instrumental in the outcome of his own life line. That’s what all the turbulence had been about, he figured. His struggle to hold on to some semblance of himself. Being/Non-being.

  A baby’s nursery. At night. The baby asleep here somewhere, he knew that. But when and where? He moved slowly about the small room, getting the feel of the place, his footing. His sense of himself stabilizing, locking into corporeality. Solid. Securely solid. It had never felt so real before—he was probably getting better at it. A master of corporeal manifestation in the past. He should ask Eli for a diploma when he got back: Simon Hayward, MCMP.

  Okay, here we go . . . On the dresser next to the baby oil and the Q-tips. A picture of a newborn’s faceless face that was interchangeable with every other day-old baby picture. We are the world. The front of the card with its oval cutout, framed in bedtime-story ribbons and teddy bears, the handwritten words on the appropriate lines: NAME: Gordon Douglas Quarendon. DATE OF BIRTH: November 2, 1956. WEIGHT: 6 lb. 7 oz.

  The kid in the crib didn’t look like the picture, but the chances of—no. It had to be him. Shit. Nine fucking months late. Twelve months maybe—what did he know about newborn babies? What they looked like after two, three . . . twenty weeks, for that matter.

  He looked out the window. A street like the baby picture—it could be anywhere in the country, anytime in the last half of the twentieth century. Urban sprawl. At first glance the car parked out front looked like a huge Volkswagen bug—something from the early fifties, no doubt. Extinct. Pre-fin. The road was slick with recent rain, streetlights showing up the puddles, the water beading on the windshield—could this be Memphis in November? Elvis out there somewhere keeping the rain off his mom, showing her Graceland. His daddy hanging back, knowing his place.

  I wish you’d never been born. Elvis a twin. Half of the set.

  What to do? He could pull back home and try again later, try for just before the wedding night maybe, but that could put him in more danger than he was in now. He could feel something already. I do not belong here. The shift in the state vector, as Eli or Blimpo Blenheim called it, playing with the flow of things. The longer I’m here the greater the chance . . . A flicker of something then—not light but darkness, a strobing. The ballast of his body attenuating for an instant, spreading his center of gravity across the floor.

  Get on with it. Over beside the crib now; in the faint street-lamp light he could make out a baby on its stomach (begging for crib death; that’s what his sister had told him—the latest findings—but what did they know back then? Doctor Spock still just a doctor), head like a grapefruit, no ponytail yet, his only dowsing rod between his legs. A warm little thing, waiting for life to happen. Caught up in his fluffy blanket; its shape a Rosetta stone of baby REM sleep. Terry-cloth warm, fresh urine warm. Simon could smell it now, this close, as he touched the skin where Gord’s clenched fist made tiny shapes out of his folded-up pinky finger. Put its life in order—retro-retro-contraception.

  Fuck, what the hell. I wish you’d never been born. Grabbing the blanket, making a tool out of it, a stopper. A fluffy stopper. I’m mending a hole where the air gets in . . .

  Gently turning its soft little head around. Oh God, don’t wake up. Eyes on him, begging. Gordon’s eyes; Gordon’s witchy, number-hungry eyes. Thanks, Gordon. Thanks for the memories. Your number’s up, man.

  Don’t look, just feel. Like wrapping fruit—oh shit he’s crying.

  29

  . . . the perfect moment

  The wind was a breeze this morning, a butterfly flutter of a breeze. Peter, Anita, and Gordon were sitting together having breakfast out on the terrace. The table’s disorder was precise, infinitely defined: the scatter of dishes on the white tablecloth; the startling orange of Peter’s juice. Gordon’s hand brushed against his crumpled napkin and it gently opened; the inhaled light carved shadows in a ceaseless calculus of readjustments.

  Peter was suddenly struck by the perfection of it all, and his awareness of the moment made it even more piquant—the savoring almost as good as the thing savored. He thought about Pam then, wanting to share it with her. As he closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun he could feel the damp warmth of her breathing on his pillow. In that instant Pam murmured something and turned in the sheets like a dolphin, then settled back to float in a new pool of sleep.

  Simon Hayward was nowhere to be seen this morning—thank God, Peter thought. That probably had a lot to do with it—the pleasure of the moment. The kid with his adult newspaper who walked through rooms as if floors and ceilings had been his idea and he should be getting some kind of residual check for letting everyone use the place.

  The waiter, a young man in a sky-blue golf shirt, began clearing away the dishes: Peter’s toast; the remnants of Anita’s fruit salad with its ceremonial, seldom-eaten lettuce leaf furling and frothing like a Japanese wave woodcut—white-capped with sticky crumbs of cottage cheese.

  Gordon had eaten enough pancakes for all of them, as if it were Shrove Tuesday and this would be the Lent of all Lents. Talking between—around—every mouthful, he’d recounted his confrontation with Simon. His hazel eyes picked up the greens and blues of his Mondrian-gridded shirt. They were wide with adrenaline—and sugar, maple sap all the way from Quebec, northern sun transformed by the Kodak of leaves into anger. His plate was a sheen of butter and syrup, the rim dribbled with a sepia Jackson Pollock.

  Anita was speaking now, and as a way of fighting the compulsion to light a cigarette she was leaning on her elbows with her hands under her chin—together, the way one would shake the wrong hand: knuckles to palm. She was telling a story from back when she was a structural engineer.

  “—so when he did that, I said, ‘Hold on, fella, our mandate here, our contract is an inspection contract—pure and simple. What’s actually wrong with the goddam footings’s nothing to do with us—’” She used her smoker’s rattle to punctuate the narrative, her breathing as a phoneme. She looked back and forth between Gordon and Peter; they obligingly smiled—one nodded, the other shook his head—in a mutually comforting acknowledgment of the “People-Are-Stupid” parable.

  Peter rubbed the stiffness in the back of his neck and thought about tennis: how it kills the body as it invigorates it—tit for tat, fitness karma, a flash of something about a universal standard of physical well-being—the pleasure/pain constant; Pam in his bed next to him like a glorious addition to his own body versus a limb that can walk off by itself leaving a ragged, bleeding stump—and then turned his attention back to what Anita was saying.

  Gordon was looking at Anita’s hands, at the jaundiced index finger of the right one, trying to picture the color of her lungs, wondering why someone with gifts like hers would choose to—

  “So they stiff us for the thirty-five thousand and we end up taking them to court.” She coughed like a hooka pipe. “I don’t think any money’s changed hands even yet and I left the company three years ago—”

  Gordon leaned back, making his chair rock on its hind legs, and said: “Now this is really interesting—you mention the number thirty-five thousand, well, I think that’s your problem right there—with that kind of number hanging over the poor guy’s head no wonder he stiffed you. Any number with a thirty-five, wow—it’s got a black cloud hanging over it. It’s screaming ‘downer,’ if you know what I mean. Now let me give you an example of a complete reverse situation. I read somewhere recently that one out of every hundred and sixty-seven American males is in jail. That’s astounding when you think about it—” Gordon was wearing a bow tie this morning, a silvery satin bow tie with an ordinary plaid shirt. “One out of a hundred and sixty-seven—you’d think that would be a no-win kind of situation, but apart from, you know, the fact that all these guys are in jail and everything, you could put a real positive spin on it if you j
ust take a look at the numbers for a second. I mean, you take a one and a six and a seven, you get fourteen, which of course reduces down to a five—”

  A ripple, a tremor—through the ether. A fold.

  “—but that’s what this project is all about. Predictable returns. You have to keep the shareholders happy,” Jane said, taking her napkin from her lap; her pancakes were hardly touched. She dabbed at her lips and looked over at Larry. He was wearing the straw hat he’d bought at the market in Philipsburg; his hand, the one with the missing fingers, was absently scratching his stomach, and she tried not to stare. Instead she turned her face into the sun and let her eyes close . . . this is good, this casual breakfast thing, our five operatives: Larry, Peter, Anita—well, three of them anyway, Pam like a delicate flower, needing special care, extra sleep, solitude; and Simon: what he needed was a kick in the butt . . . she didn’t want to think about that right now—all here together: the family thing; Eli should be here too . . . or maybe not, the way he looks at Peter sometimes, off-putting; God, I hate eggs in the morning. Why do I let myself be talked into it . . .

  Pam is preparing a dream, a dessert of a dream, folding ingredients into a whipped batter base—vanilla eyes, coconut skin. A waiter paces; he is waiting for her to finish so he can serve it. He wants to know what it’s called, what to put on the chalkboard out front. Today’s special: a Peter Pavlova Pamcake—a Peter pamcake, a Peter Pan Cake, her mouth is trying to get around the words. The waiter has a ponytail and he’s wearing a tuxedo shirt and cummerbund—a black bow tie. With a wooden spoon she is beating in a whipped cream of Peter’s words, his voice like lemon juice, then syrup, then melted butter; his thick dark hair like shavings of chocolate; the scent of him, saffron and Crayola crayons. The warmth of his chest against her cheek—I can’t eat this; it’s too rich for me, she is saying now, telling the waiter to take it away; his bow tie is expanding and turning like a propeller, slowly, so that the vanes pass in front of his face and brush his lips like a napkin. Each cycle moving things along like a slide show clicking to the next one . . . this is from last summer: my brother in Rome in front of the Spanish Steps (click) . . . here’s me and Peter in that shoe store where the owner kept telling me how much I looked like his daughter . . . (click) this is a bunch of us at Mullet Bay beach; that’s Peter on the end . . . (click) this is Peter having breakfast with Anita and . . . (click)