A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (16 page)

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touch and go

She never liked touching men, anyone for that matter—for one thing she was ashamed of her hands, the nail-biting thing—but Pam decided she wouldn't mind touching Peter. She had already touched him—sort of: when he bought the jacket in town. His shoulder through layers of fabric, fabric that wasn't really his at that point so it didn't count.

The fact that he was like her, good at what she did, the psychic stuff, made it easier somehow. Or maybe harder and that added a challenge to it: how to survive getting halfway close to someone who could meet you
more
than halfway. The
fact that she wouldn't be able to draw a line as to how close he could get. That's what she was afraid of—not being in total control of the situation.

“I want to show you something.” Pam took his hand and pulled him to his feet.

His eyes there with her own. Feeding the same optic nerve. The wave passed through her, on to somewhere else—a clashing of waves canceling each other, it felt like.
Letting go as soon as she could.

He was still thinking about dinner, and suddenly talking about it as he stood up and followed her out along the path to her building. “We can get a car and find a restaurant in town if you want. Or just walk to that place on the beach.” He was giving her options, choices; he was very good in that way—not wanting to impose—but sometimes it was nice to be just steered along a fixed path, just like she was doing to him now.

In retrospect the sensation of his hand having been in hers was a neutral thing—a fuzzy memory—as if the analgesic of anticipation, this barricade thrown up against the shock of it, had done too good a job. But it was hard to say; making contact like that was so unpredictable; sometimes all she had to do was touch a doorknob and voices and sensations would be so loud she wanted to blow her brains out. Other times when she really wanted to get right inside someone's head she came up with nothing, not a glimmer—no matter how hard she tried.

But at least she was prepared for whatever came next in their relationship. She would let him get close and fall back on it for a change, she decided. A big soft cushion. Let herself go. Let him break through the stockade around her heart.

His eyes. Brown chocolate eyes—the way they could
change like his voice; he'd pull a dialect out of thin air and unconsciously change the way he walked, shaped his face. And she'd discovered that she was good at it too—sparring with him in a Scottish accent over imaginary meals of disgustingly complex recipes for things like New Age haggis: “You take the heart and lungs of a Rolfer and add the spleen of a Phrenologist—”

Maybe he wouldn't want to get close to her for the same reasons. Two people keeping each other at bay: a stalemate, or like what happened in the cold war—she'd read about it in a magazine on the plane—mutual assured destruction, MAD. Both sides armed to the teeth so neither would risk making the first move.

But on the way to her place he turned to face her and when he caught her eye he just leaned in and gave her a kiss: a big friendly smack on the lips.
Okay,
she thought.
That went well. A bit tense but, you know, in the right direction.
But he held on to her shoulders, turned her face into the light from one of the spotlights that hung in the palm trees and looked at her for a moment, saying nothing, his face expressionless; then down at his feet with a sort of bobbing low nod, as if he were debating with himself. Reconsidering. Like it was a rehearsal for something.

Later in her room, in the dark, she opened her drawer and took out the old notebook—what she had been going to show him. She got back on the bed and walked toward him on her knees; his chest white but not as white as the sheet. Little black hairs swirling like what an electric mixer does to the surface of whipped cream—a pattern of abutted swirls, the tangent all the way down to his navel.

“This is my résumé, but it's not really a résumé because no
one's ever seen it,” she whispered in a jerky, kidlike sleep-over excitement, lying down beside him, getting comfortable, her arm circling his pillow. The notebook was resting against her thigh—cold.

She could hear his breathing: deep, slow, deep. In the thin light from the window (moonlight, she realized then, an almost full moon) she could see that his eyes were closed.
Touch him. Go on, see what he's dreaming about. Me, I bet. He's dreaming about me.
She put the thought out of her mind—there was something about it that made her think of rape—and rolled away from him. Pam pulled the sheet up to her throat, making sure that her feet were nowhere near him.

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his favorite number: “Route 66”

Gordon was in the pool doing his morning laps while Simon watched from as close to the edge as he would allow himself, which was a good fifteen feet. He waited till Quarendon emerged near the ladder—this usually signaled the end of his workout. His long hair was like seaweed as his head broke the surface, dirty gray seaweed matted against his suddenly shrunken skull.

“Gordon, my friend,” Simon said, thinking,
Jesus, what am I saying? “Friend.” I hate this guy; I truly despise everything about him; he's like my father without the good clothes.
At least
his father had ended up with a bit of money, seeing the light when he was thirty, getting a haircut and a tie, deciding to get his foot up on to the corporate ladder, hanging on to the first couple of rungs of it till he got a bit of money invested, qualified for a decent pension.

Gordon was standing there dripping beside him now, dabbing himself with a towel that looked like it had been used to plug a drain—all frayed at the edges, some odd color that used to be burgundy or cherry, one of those decorator colors. “We got to talk, Gordon. You were going to show me the map thing, the trick with the map.”

Simon turned away from him and walked back to his table, to his
Wall Street Journal
and his John Lennon biography, not wanting to be near the guy for very long, knowing what came next—the flick of the head, like a dog getting out of a bath spraying water all over the place. He didn't want Gordon's secondhand pool water getting on his new shirt, on his bare skin.

“You do it with a map the way you would any other site, except it's more concentrated—you can cover more ground but you can miss a lot if you're not careful.” Gordon spread a map of the mainland USA across the table. He opened his suitcase of divining rods on the chair next to him and took out what looked like a length of fishing line on the end of a chopstick. He leaned back and fumbled in his pocket—he was wearing a “Bud” T-shirt now, and a pair of cutoffs he'd pulled on right over his wet bathing suit—till he came up with a bunch of keys. He worked one off the ring and tied it to the end of the line. “This is the key from the first car I ever owned. A 'fifty-two Studebaker—did I ever tell you about that?” Simon
shook his head before he could stop himself; but Quarendon surprised him. “I'll tell you about it sometime. Great car,
fabulous
car—I keep this key on the ring all the time so it's close to me—part of me, you know what I mean? Works better that way.” He sniffed loudly and leaned forward, dangling the pendulum arrangement over the map. “The trick is to concentrate. You know, clear your head, get the key hanging perfectly still.” He sniffed again and closed his eyes. Simon could smell the chlorine on him; his hair was still wet and a trailing hank of it delivered one fat drop of pool water to a sizable chunk of Nevada. “Okay. I'm ready. Ask me something. No. How about, uh—give me the name of someone you know real well and I'll tell you where they are—”

Simon looked down at his own hand resting on the newspaper, on a graph of thin jagged lines: the flux of things economic; for some reason he didn't want to believe Gordon could do it. Something
he
couldn't do, that was it. Something he desperately needed to know how to do if he was going to get what he wanted. “What if I lie? What if I make something up?” He smiled and tried to laugh, hoping Gordon would see it for what it was: a stupid thing to say.

Gordon put his little fishing rod down, sat up straight, and pushed hair out of his face. His eyes narrowed as if he really had seen something, rather than heard it. “What's the point of that? Shit, man. I'm not going to waste my time here—”

“Okay, okay—my mother.”

“Your mother. What's her name?”

“What do you need her name for? What's that got to do with it?”

“It helps, okay? Everything helps.”

“Joyce. Joyce Hayward.”

Gordon took some deep breaths and started again—“When it starts to rotate, you know, clockwise, I'm on the money, or very close. Okay?”—scanning the map from left to right with the dangling key. He got over as far as the Great Lakes and it started to swing. Gordon slowed down and when the key reached Lake Michigan it began to rotate. His shoulders were hunched and his eyes seemed to be rolled back into his head.

Simon sat there with his legs crossed, his hands still resting on his folded newspaper, and waited. He heard the rev of a two-stroke engine in the distance. A small lizard did stop-
action
antics in the tendrils of a tree root, then vanished. One of the gardeners walked by with a coil of hose over his shoulder.

“Chicago. She's somewhere near Chicago. I need a more detailed map to pin it down exactly, but—”

“Wheaton,” Simon said.

“What?”

“She lives in Wheaton. It's a suburb of Chicago. Right on the money. Thank you, Gord.” He could be as polite as anyone when he gave it a thought.

“My pleasure.” Gordon put down his device and leaned back, working his shoulders, stretching with his hands clasped over his head. “You want to give it a shot now?”

Simon tried it once with Gordon's old key and when he started to feel something, something profoundly visceral, as if he were feeling the target and the movement of the key plotting a path across his stomach lining—jerking around in his gut like the needle on a lie detector—he stopped it in its tracks and feigned fatigue, beginner's frustration. That was enough; he would go it alone from here.

He sat with Gordon for ten more minutes or so pretending to be interested in his ancestors, his vegetable garden, the number of molars he had left (Simon declared that he had a full set and had to prove it to Gordon by letting him look in his mouth), his wife's disease, the number of letters in the name of the town he was born in. The fact that he was conceived on his parents' wedding night, February 4, 1956 (“just outside Memphis”), and born exactly 272 days later, which according to numerology is reduced down only as far as eleven, a Master Number. “And my actual birth date, November second, 1956, reduces down to a seven, which is, you know—represents the mystical world, psychic powers.”

Some of the stuff Simon actually found interesting: “You know, our Native American brothers in the Southwest won't go near anything associated with the number sixty-six?” He paused as if Simon were going to refute this claim, his pointed chin nodding once with his eyebrows up as high as they would go. “And that's because when you write it down most people do it with these two little counterclockwise spirals. Bad news, man. Evil. Anything
counter
clockwise. Everywhere you go, man; it must be some kind of universal taboo.”

When Gordon finally wandered off for something to eat, it came to Simon that his little conversation had been like his grandmother's habit of dipping her chocolate chip cookies in her tea; she did it just long enough for them to sag under their own tea-logged weight, but just before the sugary, lard-and-flour-reinforced structure broke down and part of the cookie tumbled into the teacup (he never once saw that happen) she had this knack of recovering with a swift little scoop of her bony hand.

Their conversation had been like that: the slow accumulation of data building to a saturation point of what he wanted from Gordon but never at any time breaking down into the components of an interrogation. But it was easy with
Gordon
—like dunking Girl Scout cookies.

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the most important meal of the day

“Larry's piggybacking,” Susan said.

“What?” Blenheim was in his bathrobe, his eyes blurred with sleep, his light hair frothing around his ears like angora. A vague memory of her getting out of bed, shower sounds—hours ago.

“Larry's piggybacking; when he goes through sometimes he gets distracted by other sessions. He ends up sending us footage of all kinds of extraneous material. This morning we got a flash of one of Simon's—somewhere in the Ural
Mountains
—
lost plutonium. All these images of rusty oil drums, broken down machinery.”

“How d'you know it's one of Simon's? Maybe he's just picking up random—”

“When he's into it, Simon's signature comes up on the scope. His alpha pattern's pretty distinctive—”

“Shit.” Mike Blenheim let Susan squeeze past him into his small kitchen. She was going to make him an omelet, a Mexican omelet—“zingy” she called it. A wake-up omelet. “Is he drinking again?”

“He
says
he's not, but you know Larry—anyway, I don't know what you're worried about. I mean, if we can control it, it could be quite a breakthrough.” She put a bag down on the counter and opened his fridge, leaning over, the light giving her tan a theatrical, rosy glow—her nostrils flared as she inspected his vegetable keeper. “Does your wife let you get away with this?” A hand up to her hair. Behind one ear; head tilting—now the other.

“Maybe we should give him some time off, get him into detox,” Blenheim said, pouring old coffee into a mug, putting it in the microwave. He scratched the back of his neck and yawned. Breakthroughs could wait till later. Susan like a piece of candy, standing there in her tan shorts, little feet in pristine tennis shoes, a plain white top with a wide scalloped neckline, the early angled light from the patio door plotting the line of her neck onto her collarbone—it was lust on the edge of gluttony. The omelet tied to the domesticity of the situation in another way now. His horniness from a lack of sleep, shift work—the difference in time zones setting crazy hours for sessions sometimes—real-time sessions for the Army Intelligence guys.

He couldn't think of sex without joining it to the mouth anymore—the image of the homunculus in introductory psychology textbooks, the cartoon depiction of sensory input, distorted into a big head and lips, a tiny torso, huge hands—where the brain wants us to be. The genitals. As a kid it had never seemed big enough: his penis. And what it was up to, what it was capable of, what it needed, had always occupied vast regions of his mental terrain. Now he saw the lips and tongue set in their rightful place, out front where they
belonged
—in the spotlight. A woman's lips and tongue: the feminine version:
homuncula.

He came up behind her—she was taking green onions, a jar of salsa out of the bag—and put his arms around her, the noise of the microwave giving him permission, somehow, how it smothered the sound of her breathing, his chin coming to rest on the top of her head—the scent of shampoo. The feel of her against him—against the terry cloth against him. “Do you know what I really want for breakfast?” His words raised his head with each move of his jaw and his voice traveled through the bone of her cranium. “What I think
you
should have for breakfast?”

Two hundred feet away in the dining area: a more formal sit-down arrangement than the lounge—if you let them know a day ahead they would actually serve you a pretty elaborate lunch if you wanted it. The patio doors closed this morning, by one of the staff just as Peter came in; the stiff breeze had done its work: paper napkins on the floor, part of a newspaper. He sat down with Anita and Gordon and tried to make small talk. Pam had asked him to stay away till tonight—one of her “mood swings,” she called it—he couldn't wipe away
the picture in his mind of her standing there with the juice glass and the bottle of white rum—holding them tight. “Peter. You can not do that!” she had screamed at him, the night before. “Next time, you stay out of my head till I say so!”

Ground rules no relationship had ever called for till now. The muscle of his psychic mind was too well developed, he realized. A lethal weapon, a responsibility—a fucking pain in the ass was what it was. He'd picked up on an image from her past—something about the predilections of an ex-boyfriend, and he'd used it without thinking to score a cheap point.

He had spent the night full of doubt, of course. His own bed like the scratchy bottom of a cage—under his feet again, under his face. Down, down among familiar furnishings, obstacles that always channeled his noisy soul back to a rerun of his breakup with Jesse—the self-pitying absolutes of “It always happens to me” and “When will I ever—” and “Why?” and “Why not?” That sort of wallowing shit he'd thought he'd grown out of. The Abandoned Child thing.

Loss, Loss, Loss instead of Gain, Gain, Gain. The half-full glass as opposed to the half-empty one—which made him think of Pam again, standing there in the doorway keeping him out, the glass she was holding like a hand grenade. He'd never seen her lip curl like that before, never wanted to again. On the phone this morning she had apologized, at least. For some of it. And he'd apologized too—for all of it.

“Something about that one really gives me the creeps.”

“What are you talking about?”

Anita nodded in the direction of the table over by the bar: Simon Hayward was eating a club sandwich and reading a newspaper. “When he walks by it's like a cold draft or something. I get these images of strange, disembodied people—
like stuff from my ghost-hunting days.” She took a sip of her coffee. Her cigarette package was under her other hand; just the tips of her fingers on it as if she were using a mouse. “Contrails. You know what I mean? I keep thinking of those smoke trails jet planes leave behind—like that for some reason.” They had all learned to let things like this out when they were together, these seemingly disjointed impressions; references that made no logical sense. “Black smoke. Burning tires.”

“I see dirt,” Gord said. “Earth. Underground stuff—I don't know.”

“Earth, Wind and Fire,” Peter said under his breath, making the other two smile. “No water, though, not anymore. I shook his hand the first day he was here. Water. Lots of water. And electricity. Bolts of lightning. The guy's a walking thunderstorm.”