A Fold in the Tent of the Sky

by Michael Hale

  Peter’s father ran a few steps, then stopped to see if he was getting away with it. He waited until he was sure she was following him, then did a slow, makeshift traveling dance across the sand to the beat of the music. He was yelling out the words to the song in spite of the looks he was getting from everyone around him. (An old man sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper told him to shut up.) He looked back over his shoulder and when he was sure she was watching him he waved.

  It was a wave that resembled a salute—a signal, a sign that says, “This is just a game—play along for a bit. What the hell. What have you got to lose?”—that kind of wave. He was almost there, at the pier, where the road ends and the boardwalk begins; where the steps led up to the hot dog stands and the carousel with its corny old calliope. He wanted to show her the inside of the ballroom, the La Monica. His older brother worked there and if he was around he could get them in even though the place wasn’t open yet—not till around suppertime. But he changed his mind at the last minute and darted back toward the water instead, back into the shadow of the pier itself. Out of the sunlight.

  Simon pulled up and away, back into the ether thinking, This game is getting more and more interesting all the time.

  An uncle too; the whole fucking family all in one place . . .

  48

  Danke, meine Herren. Vielen Dank

  There was a caramel-sweet beauty to the sensation, underlaid with a twinge of dread—way down there in Peter’s innermost innards, the itch of suspicion that he would never get back to his body—his home body—that the body he was manifesting in the past would evict the old one or build a cage around it, far away from the places it frequented, the times it lived in, and never let it get back home again—out of spite, jealousy: the rivalry of siblings.

  The sweetness came with the realization—the other side of the coin—that he could float like this forever and he would never have to go back there if he didn’t want to.

  This all passed through Peter’s mind as he suddenly saw himself looking back over his shoulder. But at the same time this image was superimposed with the sight of himself lying on the waterbed in the PsiberTech lab looking up at his departing other self—his astral body peeling away from the physical one like a Silly Putty impression. Never like this before; never so visceral, he thought—it was more than a trick of the mind now. His body, laden with muscle memory, was in on it too: a co-conspirator.

  There was a scratching, subsonic rasp on the bones of his inner ear; words in his head were fighting, elbowing for the spotlight. A breathy murmur was coming from somewhere near his left eye; it constricted into a high-pitched yelp, then ballooned into a basso grumble that retreated into a background babble of random chatter—like the voices of his early childhood, comfortingly nostalgic and terrifying all at once.

  Peter drifted through the ether in a breeze of color; but the color was flat against the plane of his vision. Two-dimensional, like a skin of swirled paint; organic, fluxing, but flat. Meat cooking: the smell of it like Sunday dinner at his grandmother’s, the burned-fat smokiness caught in his throat. The backs of his hands felt numb, chilled by the wind. The tight, upturned collar of his mock-nineteenth-century shirt girdled his neck. He pushed forward through the membrane into voluminous white; a dense liquid milk of glare. The little elfin creatures Jeff had warned him about swarmed around him for a moment or two—pale, slithery presences; fleeting smiles without faces; eyes body-languaging the meaning of words whispered into his head—then gone.

  He was holding on to an old jar of antique brown glass filmed with milky dust; it had a cork stopper and a red-bordered label bearing a handwritten chemical name: “Sodium thiosulfate.”

  It was the lodestone of his voyage into the past, the kite string of his flight through the ether—it held him back and lifted him up all at once—and he could feel it now, tugging at his hand like a nibble on the end of a fishing line. I am here and not here—both. Another paradox—you see one, you’ve seen them all.

  The unearthly wind swirled him into a tumble now, a ricocheting somersault through the crags and outcroppings of a turbulent ether. It was a time-sundered, space-addled journey to his target: Hamburg. May 28, 1843.

  He was aiming for the scrub and meadow that bordered a forest outside the city proper, a place for picnics and relaxing strolls through the countryside. The bottle would take him there, they said; and the drug. (His last injection before liftoff had been a “booster shot.”) Not just his eyes and ears this time, but all of him, in the flesh. Along with the tight shoes, the velvet jacket, the high-collared shirt and cravat, the trousers with the button fly. More than a dress rehearsal, though. Opening night.

  Corporeal manifestation in the past.

  Jeff called it “touchdown,” as if it were some little boys’ game of “Dare” and “Double Dare.” Going to the moon or Mars, dropping a bomb on Hiroshima—macho shit Peter had never felt qualified to indulge in. Acting the part was something else again. Dress me up, give me the script, and you can put me anywhere. Make me do anything . . .

  He would be taking the psychometric link with him this time, they had explained—like his clothes, within the cocoon of his Self, wrapped in the “penumbra on his aura,” he’d read in one of Jeff’s memos—even as it led him to the target. Another paradox he didn’t have the energy to grapple with.

  There was a swiftness to the transition from ether to destination he had never experienced before—probably because of the nature of his transformation from ghostly presence to flesh-and-blood—the sudden onrush of gravity; a tightness and immediacy of smell and temperature; the warmth of the sun on his cheek; the rosy flickering play of leaves and branches through his closed eyelids—the sound of a barking dog off in the distance. He was lying facedown on the ground, he realized then—solid, married to the substance of it—earth. Here and now. “Touchdown.” Show time.

  He panicked with the sudden realization that he was really here in the past and not back there—forward there?—on the slough of a coffin couch in the PsiberTech lab. Or was he? Two places, two times at once. The body replicated here, or transported? His mind was here at least—or was that a replica too?

  He opened his eyes: dead leaves, dark soil, the familiar smell of forest floor. Grass tickled his ear. The bottle was still in his hands and he let go of it and got to his feet. His tight britches pulled at his groin. The collar cut into his neck. He took a deep breath and felt a burning in his chest. What a newborn must feel, he thought. Oxygen he had no business conspiring with was in his blood now.

  He took a small mirror out of his waistcoat pocket. He straightened his foulard tie and brushed at his shoulder—everything else was in place. They had let him loose in a theatrical supply store and he’d taken pains to give himself a convincing period mustache; and he’d added a little gray to his hair . . . Peter Abbott in the flesh—here and now. He touched his cheek—skin to skin but oddly out of phase with itself, like a soundtrack out of sync.

  Peter took a step forward out of the underbrush, over a tangle of roots toward the brightness of a clearing. He could feel his own body here in this place, in this time, displacing the air, compressing the earth beneath his feet, but his body lurched through space as if he were fighting an errant center of gravity and pushing against more than the air—the weight of the future is on your shoulders. A function of being so far back in time, he figured. The inverted family tree: the countless ancestors he could be interfering with.

  Peter found himself in an open meadow, in full sunshine. In the distance he could see the spire of a church. He was facing away from a wooded hillside, and from where he was standing, he had a clear view of the river valley below. He could make out what must have been the city center with its dockyards and clutter of city streets; some of them were lined with what looked like new construction. The smoke from distant stacks merged into a leaden line above the far horizon—Hamburg in 1843, just after the Great Fire of 1842. He had been briefed by Jeff’s assi
stant with a cursory “back story” that crammed a hundred years of war-torn history into a few sentences.

  He heard something—voices, from somewhere behind him—not in his head this time, but as real as if he were back in Iowa on the grounds of PsiberTech. He turned around to see a group of men assembled in the shade of a large oak tree and he sensed right away that they were members of the Hamburg Art Club. Off to one side another man was attaching a large wooden box camera to a tripod. The photographer, Stelzner—it had to be. He finished what he was doing and hurried back to what looked like a small tent. As he drew closer Peter could make out the gist of what they were saying—all in German of course. It was the sparring bravado of men away from women—jibes and harmless jokes.

  One of the group came toward him; he was wearing a top hat sitting back on his head. He had sunken cheeks and bloodshot eyes. “Mein Herr, du bist spät. Kommen Sie hier, bitte.” He walked with a slight stiffness in one leg. “Wir machen eine Aufname. Schnell, schnell . . .” Peter was visible, tangible to others as well as himself, he realized then—the solidity of his presence was no illusion.

  Why the man before him assumed he belonged in the photograph, he did not know. Seeing his well-worn trousers and wrinkled jacket, Peter felt conspicuous in the stiffness of his neatly pressed costume facsimile. At least he could understand what the man was saying; the foreign words rang with meaning, as if the thoughts behind the sound waves hitting his ears were falling simultaneously on the cells of his brain.

  “Willkommen. You must be Bremner, the writer; am I correct? You have the hands of a writer.” The man smiled and his bloodshot eyes glazed over. Peter wasn’t sure what could have marked them as writer’s hands—ink stains maybe, here in this pre-computer age. But his hands were clean. Maybe that was it. The shape of his fingers? Maybe the guy was versed in some offshoot of phrenology or palmistry. And who was this “Bremner”? He had been prepared to create an excuse for his unheralded appearance among them—even sneak out of the bushes and crash the photo shoot if he had to—but this was too easy. He wondered what had happened to the real Bremner.

  “Können Sie sich bitte beeilen? Come, come. Hurry. Carl is anxious about the light.” He touched Peter’s arm and for a fraction of a second the sky above seemed to roll into itself and shimmy through an iridescent somersault as the blue of it retreated into yellow-green, then red, then slid quickly back to blue again. A tuning out, he thought to himself. It was as if he’d tweaked the dial on an old radio. The man’s voice Doppler shifted from German to English to German: “. . . Licht . . . light . . . Licht. He doesn’t want to lose a second of it.”

  Peter stood still and let the man go ahead of him; he tried closing his eyes for a moment but gave up on that when he found himself losing track of where his limbs were. He looked up and the sky was blue again, and clear except for a few clouds—cumulus pillows drifting through mutations at a normal, relaxed pace, he was glad to see.

  The photographer, Stelzner, came out of the tent with what must have been the unexposed plate. The club members took a few minutes to compose themselves in spite of the urgency; the late-afternoon sun slanted through the trees’ ever-lengthening shadows while Stelzner fussed with the composition, arranging the assembled artists into a tableau that to Peter seemed a little too contrived. He placed Peter stage right of a man holding a sheet of paper (he could smell his cologne, and the slight odor of old beer in the fabric of his jacket). It was a musical score, a waltz, Peter figured from the little he saw of it. The man sitting in front of him was perusing a bound collection of large prints: views of churches and ruined abbeys.

  Stelzner finally bade them hold the pose, then reaching with a delicate sleight of hand, he carefully removed the lens cap. He took out his pocket watch and held it up into the light, away from his own shadow.

  It was a minute that could have been ten, it seemed to Peter. He was conscious of the lurching sway of his own heart as it ever so slightly pendulumed his trunk. He sensed that this was the essence of old photographs, what made them more than the sum of their parts: the time lapse of living things etching the daguerreotype plate with the blur of breathing and the minute twitches and reflexes of organic adjustments.

  He remembered Jeff telling him that in the old spiritualist photos the ghostly invaders, the “phantasmal faces,” were called “extras.” I am a leading man, he thought, or a swing who knows all the parts and is ready to fill in for the sick and lame. Poor old Bremner—whoever he is. All this passed through his mind while the stopwatch and the elusive turn of the earth registered as the passage of time. Old time, hundred-and-fifty-year-old time. Time he had no business living through.

  A cloud passed in front of the sun. Stelzner clucked and cocked his head as if he were listening to something in the distance; he scratched at his beard. No one spoke; no one moved. He put the watch back in his pocket and closed his eyes. He raised his arms; his open hands were poised as if he were conducting the tempo, the dance steps of the silver molecules. He snapped his fingers, then quickly recapped the lens.

  Stelzner looked up at them all and smiled; he took a deep breath and said: “Danke, meine Herren. Vielen Dank.”

  They all clapped. Even Peter. It seemed right somehow. Stelzner bowed his head for a second—like the dip of the head that comes with the click of heels in bad movies about Nazi Germany—then started fiddling with the back of the camera. Some cheered and slapped Stelzner’s back—as if he had in fact gone to the moon and returned in his wooden box detailed with picturesque brass fittings—this was the age of Jules Verne after all, full of an energetic faith in the absolute fact of scientific progress.

  In celebration, they all headed off to a tavern on the edge of the park—a shabby brick farmhouse, it looked like to Peter, with a line of hitching posts out front and a modest sign over the door. The only other detail that marked it as a public place was the mud-furrowed widening of the road and the litter of horse dung.

  As he entered the inn he was overwhelmed with heavy, humid air—the acid bite of wood and cigar smoke; the stink of beer, cabbage, and humanity. A fellow club member, a short man wearing thick glasses and an oversized hat, handed him a glass before he had a chance to sit down: a pint of lager. He was directed through the hubbub of drinkers to a long table that had been reserved, it seemed, for the art club. There was a place set for him with a plate of bread and some sort of sausage. Slices of pale sausage with sauerkraut and potatoes.

  A woman came by; she worked her way along the row of seated men touching each shoulder in turn till she reached Peter and the man with the bloodshot eyes. His top hat was gone now and his thinning hair showed patches of scale on his scalp. She sat on his knee with a pronounced self-consciousness that prompted all around them to pay lewd attention. But she immediately asked to be introduced to Peter and in his stupor—later he put it down to the languid wash of the hot room and the alcohol, the sluggish performance of his ersatz body—he unthinkingly reached out and took her hand.

  She was a tall, slender woman of about twenty. Her plain, high-necked dress was unbuttoned to reveal the swelling preface of her breasts, but the linen beneath her dark muslin was yellowed and stained. Her eyes too seemed rheumy and bloodshot, as if not just the smoke but the idea of photography itself were taking its toll on all these inhabitants of 1843.

  She looked long and hard at Peter, then smiled down at him from the man’s lap; the poor fellow seemed to shrivel under the weight of her and the sudden obscurity of his position; she was ignoring him, turning him into an armchair after all; she pushed the plate out of the way and leaned forward. Her hands were long and thin and she folded them in front of her like braided bread. They were stained with what looked like ink; Peter could see dirt under her fingernails. These were the hands of a writer, he thought. She would write about him one day, even if she never saw him again. He knew this fact the way he knew the color of blood—why blood? he thought. Where had that come from? Das Blut.

  Or paint his pi
cture and he would leave his mark on more than copper plate. Her mouth opened on tiny, uneven teeth. She winked and said something to him and he had no idea what she was talking about. The man under her hissed. And then she looked right into Peter’s eyes without smiling and asked him his name.

  So the drink diluted his vigilance—he was careless—and he leaned across the table and asked her to repeat the first part of her question. She touched him, or he let her touch him, and once more he felt the shifting pulse of dislocation. Assonant energy rippled across the room. The warm light of the oil lamps smudged into green, then red-amber; it congealed into brilliant, bleaching white for an instant, then shifted back to red. The man whose lap she was sitting on said something—even with his heightened accommodation to the thoughts of his fellow art club members, Peter couldn’t make it out, but he sensed the venom behind it—and she turned to him over her shoulder and spat in his face. Before she could get up the man pushed her from his lap, knocking over the table in the process, and all that was on it: beer and sausage, glass and crockery. Sauerkraut and loaves of dark bread and more beer and clots of mashed potato as people jumped away from the upset benches.

  Peter retreated from the melee of crashes and raised voices as quickly as he could. He smiled and brushed at the froth of beer on his sleeve and bowed his way out of the immediate area. He found a place on the sidelines and shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment along with the others. In less than a minute he was out on the street.

  The sun had set and apart from a few lighted windows in the near distance the faint glow of the western sky was all that showed the way along the lane back to the park. It took him longer than he thought it would—his legs seemed weighted down with mud-hobbled boots and his shoulders ached as if he had a pack on his back; and he was shivering uncontrollably by the time he finally found the spot in the scrubby border of the meadow where he had “touched down” that afternoon. The bottle was still where he had left it, but it was broken.