A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  He got up from the bed and plugged in the small hotel kettle. Tea, now, was his beverage of choice. Always had been, of course. The old part, the coffee part, had been pushed into the background. He looked in the mirror and the image of himself blurred for an instant; a wave of vertigo crashed against his consciousness: This is not me—the hair parted in the middle, tied in a ponytail at the back. The way his teeth looked, the shirt he was wearing—then it would shift back into position; the constant of who he was now, and always had been.

  He wondered what Peter Abbott was up to, whether his Pamlessness had driven him over the edge; what Jane was doing. Jane Franklin . . . Jesus. A pang of something—lust mixed with sorrow—washed over him. The yearning for times gone by, a nostalgia for what he’d never experienced; a flash of realization that he’d taken things into his own hands and spoiled everything.

  He was suddenly overwhelmed with images that seemed to echo and bifurcate and fork along paths of possibility—future possibility—even as they popped into his head. The real world was breaking up into the subroutines of the unreal. The surreal. The Never-Never-Land of what-might-have-been. The dizziness came back and he reached out for the sink and missed. He ended up on the floor staring at broken tile where the pipe behind it broke through the wall. This is real, he told himself. The here-and-now—the world he had created for himself.

  Go easy on yourself; take your time, he told himself. The recovery period after doing in Pam had been longer than for any of the others (his body was wearing away or his aura was suffering from ether erosion); he didn’t want to face anything like that again—the blood in his urine for two days straight, the headaches, the vomiting. After slipping his hand into the guy’s chest back in 1967—it seemed like a good idea at the time—his hand had emerged from the ether for a second. Not his whole body, but the displacement had been enough, something to do with spreading himself too thin, maybe; the disjunction of hand and body. Anyway, it had been like grabbing on to the door handle of a car going by on the freeway. Tweaking the guy’s coronary artery—it must have set things in motion. Coronary occlusion cutting off more than just blood.

  He could travel into the past; change things, manipulate events—he had to remember that. Be proud of it, profit from it—just don’t overdo it. The trip itself was routine; it was the fine-tuning part he was still working on. The intricacies of gauging the ripple factor.

  “I’m a luthier,” he said looking down at his hands as if he were ashamed to admit it. “I make violins, violas—a cello every so often.” On the phone he’d said that a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of his had given him Simon’s telephone number—and his e-mail address.

  Simon and the luthier—his name was Trevor—were in a small Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto. Trevor looked afraid all of a sudden. His eyes blinked as he brought the cup to his lips. “It’s not the quantities, the list of ingredients themselves—that would be more than enough. The actual recipe, I would consider a bonus.” He picked up his napkin and wiped his mustache.

  “How much?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What’s your budget? How much is it worth to you—this formula? I mean, what could you do with it? Make fake Strads? Make new ones? What—”

  “A million dollars, if it works. Within a year, say. And if we license it, I’d give you a percentage of what other people make—‘points.’ Isn’t that what they call it?” He sat up as if buoyed by his own street wisdom and took another sip of cappuccino. Simon looked out the window into the busy street. An old woman went by with what looked like a cat or a small dog inside her overcoat. “I wouldn’t try to pass them off as the real thing,” he said, putting down his cup. “That would be far too difficult. They would have my name on them. My imprimatur.” He smiled and looked around him as if the audacity of the remark were astounding everyone in the restaurant.

  A remote viewing session for real cash this time—hard currency. Five hundred thousand dollars—but with no risk of implosion, even if he did materialize. Unless Cremona, Italy, in 1737 harbored one of his distant ancestors. But he wouldn’t be doing a real jump. No need to touch down for this one—it was strictly an intelligence gathering session. Just like the old days, the alt days. German for “old” seemed more suitable, somehow: the alt-ernative days.

  “People have been trying to come up with the varnish formula since the day he died—some say tung oil’s the main ingredient, others shrimp shells boiled in lye. We don’t really know. Cat piss, all kinds of things—but he did write it down very close to his death in 1737. That we do know. There are accounts of his contemporaries attesting to the fact.” He had a slight accent that Simon attributed to his line of work more than anything else—a hissing attenuation to his “s”s.

  “They’re worth a lot of money, right? The actual Strads?”

  “At auction, if the provenance is in good order, the condition—a Stradivarius can fetch, oh, upwards of two, three million dollars.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows out of politeness—a business politeness—he knew what Strads were worth but he forced himself to seem surprised. He took up his own cup and turned in the direction of the draft from the door: a couple had just come in with a baby in a car seat; the woman looked a bit like Betty—the dark, straight-cut hair, the round face. “I can’t guarantee anything. Fifty thousand up front no matter what I come back with. Do we have a deal?”

  The guy’s mustache was tipped with froth—he nodded and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I wish I could go with you. I’d pay you even for the privilege of being in the same room as the man himself—watching him work.” He looked off into space, imagining it. “I suppose you can’t take pictures. Now that would be something—”

  “I used to know someone who could do that, but he’s no longer with us.”

  The waiter came by and the luthier took out his charge card right away. The guy was in a hurry for some reason and it disappointed Simon. He was actually enjoying himself.

  “You talk about Strads and”—Trevor was still fussing with his wallet but he shot Simon a smile to let him know he was listening—“and every time you say that, I think you’re talking about ‘Strats,’ you know? The electric guitar? Old Fender Stratocasters—the kind Hendrix used to play? They’re valuable too, aren’t they? The old ones.”

  The luthier said nothing for a second—his face was blank. Then, “Fender?” Simon nodded. “Like—on a, car?” He frowned and looked down at the check with his Visa card sitting on it, then out the window into the street (the woman was back, or someone much like her, but the cat was gone), his face stilled by the subroutine of recollection at it circled back, looping, gleaning—and coming up with nothing.

  45

  . . . digging up Peter’s roots

  Simon’s St. Christopher medal loomed like a dinner plate before him. He was suspended in the ether preparing himself for his glide down into Asheville, North Carolina, and the National Climatic Data Center: the repository of over fifty years’ worth of daily weather maps, all stored on microfilm.

  His medal floated nose high, and the tricky ether light turned the gold into green, then copper, then back to gold again. He reached up and stuffed it into his shirt; touching it made him think of buttered popcorn, like the time his hand had passed through the bag of gold nuggets at the old Spanish mission site in New Mexico. But the medal was part of him here, along with his clothes, so he could grab it, feel its texture without passing through it. His dowsing device—what he would use to track down Peter Abbott’s conception date.

  Down into a high-ceilinged storage room with its arched glass roof and ornate cornice: it seemed more like a church than a storage room—gun-metal gray angle-iron shelving, magazine boxes and loose-leaf binders. And microfilm canisters, an aisle of them about a half a football field long, on shelves at least sixteen feet high.

  He dipped down into the nearest aisle, took out his St. Christopher medal, and let it dangle from his neck as he slowly drifted in and
out of the stacks of stored film. His body tingled as his flesh and bone passed through the steel shelving. Think about the guy, Peter Abbott, as a little boy, now as a baby—the medal started to move off by itself like the nose of a beagle sniffing along a fence—Remember what Gordon said—don’t push it. Clear your head, let the medal do the dowsing for you. Think about the guy as a sperm now, slamming into the egg, the moment of conception . . .

  Something grabbed at the medal, he felt it suddenly cut into the back of his neck. He was being pulled like a balloon on a string, up and out of the aisle, then down, through the floor—the concrete, a syrup of viscous resistance for a moment—then into darkness. The medal swerved to the left: then up and to the right, the chain digging into his ear. It took him up through the floor again into the main storage area—to a shelf near the wall. The medal came to a standstill and floated at eye level; it began to wobble like a coin spun and released on a table, the shimmying vibration accelerating till it thrummed to a blur of smudged glitter.

  This was it; this one here. Simon moved forward, headfirst so that his face, his eyes, his whole head passed through the canister of microfilm. His optic nerve, his whole brain it felt like, was scanning the coiled acetate, frame by frame, map by map . . . day by day by day, back, back to the day of Peter’s conception: July 15, 1962. He’d found it. Delta T.

  Like a phosphene in his mindful eye, his medal down again, down into the grainy emulsion. It seemed to be dancing, spelling it out like a worker bee telling the hive where to find the nectar—this way, that . . . He felt himself shrinking (his head slipped free of the medallion chain) and condensing into a mite of consciousness. His medal was the size of a manhole cover now, rolling along ahead of him, across the surface of the map marked “July 15, 1962.” He knew the time, now he needed to know the place: x and y coordinates; longitude and latitude. St. Christopher, show me the way—

  The medal as big as a spinning city block, now—a baseball stadium; he was skimming the surface of the map like a low-flying stealth fighter swooping down in the wake of the giant medal, past fingerprint swirls of isobars, temperature gradients, lakes, rivers, hieroglyphs of highways and county lines, state borders, train tracks . . . across the continent to California.

  And there it was—the exact place: no mistaking it. Santa Monica, California.

  He had his coordinates (applause as the music reaches a crescendo): “Peter Abbott: THIS Is Your Life. And this is where it ALL began . . .”

  And where it’s all going to end.

  46

  . . . say “Cheese,” or better yet, “Käse”

  Peter came upon a reproduction of a Salvador Dalí painting on the wall of one of the lounges in the new PsiberTech building. It was The Persistence of Memory, the one with the melting watches draped over the edge of a table and the branch of a tree.

  What Peter noticed now about the painting was the strange jellyfish creature washed up on the shore with its huge eyelid closed forever on the past, he thought—forcibly closed against the eternal tide of memory. The eyelashes were like prison bars.

  He realized he wanted to be free of Pam now, free of the grit of her image behind his own eyelids. Even with them closed he would be overwhelmed sometimes with a vision of the curve of her neck and the ovoid sweep of her forehead; it had always demanded the touch of his lips; and with that thought came the memory of the taste of her skin. Sweetness and musk—with a hint of citrus.

  Falling in love. It was like light hitting photographic film and rearranging the molecules. It drenched the brain with cascades of transforming chemicals—endorphins, supposedly. And when it all came to an end, in the drought of withdrawal, there was nothing left but the pain. Losing it was like the stop bath that locked the photographic image forever into a state of becoming.

  Peter turned away from the print and looked out the window at the framed scene of the trees and telephone poles and the snow-covered cars parked around the campus quadrangle; at the Greek Revival facades of the library and what used to be the dean’s residence—fairy-tale memories of a Golden Age. As surreal as anything Dalí could come up with.

  Pam was a dream it was time to wake up from. He didn’t want the memories anymore—the pleasure or the pain of them. He didn’t have the energy for it. He looked back at the print and saw the ants then. Ants eating something from another watch turned facedown on the table. Was that new or had they always been there?

  So when Jeff the lab supervisor approached him with a project that he said would be all-consuming, exhausting—possibly dangerous—he did not hesitate to volunteer for it. If he’d asked him to walk to the North Pole and back barefoot, he would have agreed to that too.

  “We have a new drug we want you to try out.”

  They were sitting in Jeff’s office on the fifth floor of the new building (no Dalí prints here: the framed pictures leaning against the walls waiting to be hung were a collection of vaguely abstract city-scapes—long on energetic brush strokes but short on substance). His new desk was a sheet of tempered glass supported by what looked like a giant ant colony—a glass case filled with layers of colored sand. The air was loaded with the smell of drying paint and new broadloom. One of the office chairs was still wrapped in plastic.

  “A drug. What sort of drug?”

  “Psychotropic. A stimulant, but it acts like serotonin in some ways—more like DMT—you know about DMT? Tryptamine psychedelics, psilocybins?” Peter shook his head. He wanted generalities and Jeff was giving him detail. He felt a headache coming on. Dehydration probably. Two sessions in one day always left him dehydrated.

  “It’s related to the tryptamines produced by the pineal gland,” Jeff continued; he flicked through loose pages in an old file folder that looked out of place on the expanse of clean smoked glass. “Your brain produces a lot of it, it says here; the third eye and all that?” He smiled at Peter’s puzzled frown and pushed the folder to one side. He brought his hands up under his chin; his index fingers steepled to bisect his lips: “Anyway, this stuff is mind-bending, to say the least—”

  “My mind is bent enough already. What’s it for?”

  “It’s an amplifier—it enhances psychic abilities. We want to see if it works on someone like yourself.”

  The huge window that took up one wall of the office gave on the playing field; someone had driven halfway across it and reversed back out, leaving behind an arc of parallel tracks in the fine dusting of recent snow. The marks looked like a scripted lowercase “s” joined to an undotted lowercase “i.”

  “Why me?” Peter said after a moment. “I thought I would be at the bottom of your list.”

  “You’re an actor, right? Or were an actor.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I am acting now, he thought to himself. This is not really me, there is more to me than you could ever imagine. This is just part of me—one fraction of who I am. He remembered how it used to be at auditions, how rejection was such a big part of his life—you’d go in there and give them a hundred percent of yourself—and all you’d get was the “thanks-but-no-thanks” routine.

  “Everything. We want you to, uh—‘perform,’ I guess. Play a part. How’s your German?”

  “Nonexistent. Why?”

  “Just wondered. Anyway, we’re aiming for something much more—how shall I put it?—exacting than RV.”

  “I’m finding that ‘exacting’ enough, right now.”

  “The thing is, the competition’s been experimenting with OBE precipitates—”

  “OBE what?”

  “They haven’t succeeded yet, but we can’t let them get the upper hand, if you know what I mean. We’ve got to stay one step ahead of them.”

  Jeff leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath as if he were getting ready to dive. “Colin. You know how he sometimes overdoes it? Ends up leaving ‘vapor trails,’ as he calls them? Says he does, anyway.”

  Colin Ralston, the ex-fireman from Kansas City. He was always coming out of sessions wi
th tales of how he felt as if he were actually there—right there in the scene he was supposedly just observing.

  After a session that had taken him to Aberfan, Wales, in 1966—the scene of the devastating landslide of coal mine tailings that had killed over a hundred schoolchildren—he claimed he had found himself mingling with the rescue workers. He tried talking to some of the people; he’d accidentally touched someone’s arm, he said. And when he came out of the session he had a toothache and his little finger was numb. No one could figure out why. Coincidence was the final conclusion of the PsiberTech theory people. You don’t touch someone in the past and end up with a toothache—it had to be a coincidence; it didn’t make any sense otherwise. The numb finger was something to do with how he had been positioned on the couch, they said. A pinched nerve.

  “We’ve got him trying to do it now—”

  “Touch people.” Peter thought of Simon but he kept his mouth shut.

  “Yes, if he ever gets some kind of consistency in his alpha pattern—that’s where this new drug comes in—”

  “Interference. That’s kind of risky, isn’t it?”

  “The theory guys think so—they want to take the conservative approach, do some trials with real-time intervention first, but you know how it is in this market—the competition’s way ahead of us on this one. That’s what the people upstairs would have us believe anyway.”

  “But you’re not worried about, you know, changing things, changing history?”

  “‘Changing history.’ Yeah, well—the theory people, they’re a little nervous about it. They approach it like all those environmentalists a few years back, wringing their hands over global warming. ‘Mother earth’s running a fever’ and all that crap.” He snorted and picked something off his jacket sleeve. “The universe is big. I mean—what could be bigger, right? It would take a lot of shit-disturbing to make a difference.”