A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (25 page)

He got up and fell down again, making a noise this time—the branches of the bushes cracking under him; and the guy with Anita's mom must have heard it. He turned away from her, interrupting whatever he was doing; Simon could hear him mumble something out the window into the night. With each fragment of a word Simon felt an echo ripple through the ether, as if each utterance were traveling down millions of corridors and flinging open countless doors of possibility . . .

Ted had never been lucky enough to have this kind of opportunity before and he'd be damned if he was going to let this dame—this chance—slip by. A married one; her wedding ring had been right there in full view when she was eating her cone, which meant she was at least acquainted with going all the way . . . first base, second, third, being married wasn't like that, he'd come to realize. Married couples just did it. All the time, whenever they wanted. It was more like just going up to bat. Three strikes, four balls—whatever: all just part of the game, the peanuts, the Crackerjack . . . that brick wall he'd run into with Connie at the drive-in. It had been a real date with Cokes and hamburgers and all; he'd even agreed to pick her up at her friend's place so her parents wouldn't catch on—all that legwork then to slam right into a fucking brick wall just as he was heading for home plate. And that time with Bill's sister Wendy—her necking with him for like an hour with the lights out and then basically treating him like he was a piece of shit as soon as he tried to feel her up. This one was
married
—he had to keep telling himself that. Interested
in him only for one thing—which was just fine by him. Her husband was reluctant to do his marital duty for some reason. That wasn't any of his business of course; she was an adult. Twenty-five, maybe older than that, he figured. Twenty-eight. Anyway, she could do whatever she liked. Skinny as all hell but shit—as his older brother liked to say: turn 'em upside down they all look the same. Not that he had actually ever seen a woman upside down, except in a magazine his brother kept in his room behind the dresser.

He took out his Luckies as soon as he shut the car off and tapped one out of the pack the way he'd been practicing. She took the first drag as if she were coming up for air and did that thing where you exhale and suck the smoke up into your nose at the same time . . . just as the Everly Brothers came on: “Bye Bye Love,” which was his favorite right then, and it was all like a movie—the music and this real woman in his dad's car with him up here looking out over Pittsburgh with the twinkly lights and all, which was supposed to be as good as Spanish fly—at least according to his brother. Or an aspirin in a bottle of Coke. He should have thought of that.

Simon had retreated into the ether, but he felt compelled to go back. Something had thrown him off but he wasn't going to give up. He was willing to give it one more shot, try a different tack . . .

The brassiere under the young man's fingers: a tactile recapitulation of the shape of his car (Simon could read this from some deeper structure of Ted's understanding). This was the good life: the car, the breasts—the solid hard fact of progress; the elements of the ritual stylistically harmonized. Like the city down below, the steel mill stacks, the lights of them
burning all through the night. Opportunity. Grab it while you can.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold . . .
Where did that come from? A poem Simon had learned in school, a snatch of it. Out of the blue—memory a funny thing, capricious.

What to do now? This was the moment—he was sure of it. The bold move, the offensive, for a change. Anita the issue here—the outcome, so to speak, of this indiscretion on her mother's part. And who could blame her? What with the prospect of going home to Mr. Creosote.

He felt himself materialize off to the left of the car, in shadow beside a clump of bushes. The sudden weight of himself, the uneven ground, the feel of gravel under his feet. He took a deep breath: the sweet scent of weeds and a hint of burning coal. The air heavy with humidity. The sudden touching down, the compression of his vertebrae. The sound gone all of a sudden—then he remembered he had brought something else over here along with his clothes—his materialized ears were stuffed with earplugs; he took them out and heard the crickets again, the thin whine of radio music from the car radio.

He had to figure it out: what to do. Now that he was committed to this time and place.

Act.

He suddenly felt the heft of consequence turning every move of his body into the first pedal of a bike in high gear. Up the hill of history; against the current. More than that—he was changing the flow. Everyone who would ever come into contact with Anita,
had
come into contact with her—their lives would be edited, rearranged, rechoreographed.

Do it now.

Simon came out from behind the bushes and jumped onto the hood of the car. The metal buckled. He lost his balance and his arms came forward, slapping the roof as he broke his fall. The woman screamed, then the guy said, “What the fuck?” his voice breaking into a prepubescent yelp. The woman stopped to take a breath, then started up again—a full-throttled mezzo bellow, a monster movie belt-of-a-scream—pulling clothing up to her chest as she gazed through the windshield at the glowing figure of Simon. His body was strobing now as he struggled to maintain corporeality; he faded into nothing and backed into the storming ether.

As he tacked up and out of there the eddies and currents of the distorted time line thrashed at his limbs, threatening to tear him apart. The fold in the fabric of things was permanently pressed: Anita was gone for good—
I have done it again,
he said to himself. That simple: pre-coitus interruptus.

(The universe was dickering with itself, wrangling, recalibrating, deciding—where to take the irritant out of the scheme of things—in a totting up of accounts that was just on the edge of reshuffling the deck in Anita's favor—whether to let it be, the reconfigured flow looping back and forth between Now and Then, Past and Future. It was an intricate contortion of time and place. Some would call it an Act of God, or Fate, or History, Karma—there are many names for the calisthenics of the unfolding .
.
.
)

Nat's duet with Natalie

“We're moving you all out of here—I'm sorry.” Jane looked tired, burdened with more than the laptop she carried over her shoulder. “It's not my decision; head office wants us to streamline things a little.”

The meeting had been called less than an hour ago, and most of the technicians and office staff filling the chairs in the lounge area and spilling out onto the patio seemed eager to return to what they had been doing. The only psychic operatives at the meeting were Peter and Pam, and someone he now realized was another element unique to this time line:
Colin Ralston, a heavyset, middle-aged ex-fireman from Denver. No one else—just the three of them. There was a place for Simon in Calliope's lineup but he'd resigned. In this stream of things he'd picked up and left just as suddenly as he had in the last one.

“We're moving you all to a location just outside Iowa City,” she said, glancing down at a sheet of paper. “Our target date is about two weeks from now, so, if I were you I would finish up what's on your desk and start packing.” There were groans from a few of the techies standing beside the coffee machines at the back—some people just turned away and started out of the room. “Any questions, talk to Sanderson. He's coordinating it all.” Jane presented them with something close to a smile: “It's not
that
bad; we're taking over the facilities of a prep school. Nice old campus, lots of trees.”

Peter was walking along the beach with his shirt off enjoying the sunshine and the fresh breeze coming in off the ocean, trying to make the best of his last few weeks in St. Martin, and the next instant, he was on a dirt driveway lined with mature maples. In a place smelling of wet leaves and damp car exhaust now—he felt the cold slap of a north wind on his face. His legs gave out for a second as if he'd been playing Whirling Dervish and he ended up sprawled in a puddle.

No more palm trees and conch chowder. He was wearing an overcoat and a pair of leather gloves . . . recognizable of course, gloves he'd bought only yesterday at a mall about six blocks away.

My God. Not again, not so soon. Another one.
Pam. His Pam, thank God, was with him here—near Iowa City, a few miles out of town. He could see her about ten paces ahead of
him farther along the drive with Linda, one of the technicians. She had turned around and was running back to see what had happened, calling his name.

It was Anita this time. Who else could it be? No one else left but him and Pam, the new guy, Colin Ralston. And Simon of course, but he was immune to it. The disease never attacks itself.

And then the weight of all the conflicting memories and memorials to all the people he had known and lost since joining Calliope began to push at the boundaries of his
cranium
—thirty-two. His actor's memory again; he knew all the parts of every version of the script.

Thirty-two alternate paths his life had taken since Ron Koch had done himself in. All blurring into a noisy gray mishmash of images and voices and conflicting reminiscences. No more Anita. But Pam was there spilling over the boundaries of all of them—like a darting hummingbird, the interfering wave forms of who she was in his mind—overlapping, fan-folded, a time-lapse blur of flapping wings solid and ephemeral all at once.

She had a little scar just above her eyebrow he noticed then as she bent down to help him up. From her half-open mouth her breath rose in the cool air like a flame. She pushed a curtain of hair behind an ear; her brow was wrinkled with concern as her index finger came to her lips—then the sound of the nail: snagged; caught in the machine of her anxiety.

“You remember what I said about all those people disappearing? The Calliope people?” he said, taking off his coat, hanging it on the hook behind the door. They were sharing an apartment in this latest version of things.

“The sort of reverse amnesia?”

“Did I say that? ‘Reverse amnesia'?”

She nodded over her coffee cup and swallowed quickly. “When we were in that luggage shop near the place where they gave you the bad haircut.”

He did remember that conversation now, along with the one in his apartment in St. Martin. And another parallel conversation where he had discussed it with Pam and Gordon, after Larry had disappeared. Another version with Anita and Larry after Gordon had vanished—he stopped it right there. “Well, it's happened again,” he said, getting a cup for himself. “Her name's Anita. Anita Spalding. And I know exactly what you're going to say.”

They approached Jane and the head of the lab, Sanderson, and arranged to meet the next day in Jane's small office, and after fumbling with chairs brought in from the lounge down the hall and stepping over file boxes and stacks of books till everyone found a place to settle, Peter told them the whole story: about what he remembered—about all these people the whole universe had chosen to forget. The subtle changes he had noticed: the nuances of speech patterns; the world in general altered in ways he couldn't define.

And specific things: “I have these very early memories from, say, back when I was eight or nine of this scandal in the White House. Nixon's White House. Something to do with a break-in; some ex-CIA guys were involved. He ended up being impeached. Does that ring any bells with you people at all?”

Jane said nothing for a while; she avoided his eyes and made a few notes on her pad. Occasionally raising her hand to slow him down. He wanted to ask her about Thornquist—whether she was missing him as much as he was—but changed his
mind. Jane looked older today; her eyes looked tired. The cafeteria rumor mill was hinting at a possible management shake-up.

Throughout it all, Sanderson played the impartial man of science. Every now and then he would pause to key something into his laptop. He approached the story as if Peter were a patient presenting him with a peculiar set of symptoms.

In general Peter's revelations were met with polite
skepticism
—sometimes nervous silence; Jane thought it was an interesting notion that someone could actually go back and interfere with the past—remote viewing expertise hadn't progressed that far yet. Reliable observation was the best they could hope for, if that—but yes, it
was
an interesting idea. One of the theory people would get a memo about it.

“We have no records of them ever being here.” She checked her notes. “This Gordon Quarendon, or a Larry McEwan, Anita Spalding—none of them.”

“It could be a side effect of RV exposure to the ether,” Sanderson said, crossing his legs. “More artifice than arti
fact,
if you know what I mean—you're projecting.”

“Like phantom limb pain?”

“Pardon?”

“Someone once told me that's what it was like—these delusions I have.”

“‘Delusions.' Well, I wouldn't go that far. It's to be expected to some degree; we've all been under a great deal of pressure lately. You're projecting, that's all.”

Sanderson got up to leave, as if that were enough: his few words, a spell that could drive out demons. “Why don't you—get some rest, take a few days off? Your sessions could be rescheduled for now, or assigned to someone else?” He
looked over at Jane with a questioning raise of the eyebrows. She nodded and wrote something down.

Pam spoke up then: “Why don't you tell them, Peter?”

They all turned to look at her. She reached over for Peter's hand and knew right away that he didn't have the energy for it; so she carried on: “We think it's Simon.”

“Simon Hayward?”

Pam nodded. “I saw him do it.”

What do you mean, you ‘saw him do it'? Do what?”

“I watched him. I was”—she wondered how much she should tell them: the unauthorized session thing being such a taboo at Calliope—“dreaming, I guess. I ended up in this place where he was killing a little baby. A little boy. And I
know
it was Gordon Quarendon. I just saw his name spelled out right in front of me—like one of those simple locator targets Linda gives us all the time—the sound of the name in my head. Anyway—he was actually killing the baby with a pillow—”

Jane blinked a few times and said, “I think you two are spending way too much time together.”

This version of Calliope felt more like a down-at-the heels sanitarium than a college campus. The climate had something to do with it, Peter figured—the incessant rain for the past few weeks, the dour gray sky. The linoleum floors of the hallways, the ingrained odor of urine drenched in disinfectant. The grimy halo around all the doorknobs.

Pam spent the next day looking for Simon Hayward—three hour-long remote viewing sessions behind the locked door of their quarters. She used her trolling technique. “Like channel surfing,” she said, “only more strenuous.” During the
last one, Peter had to hold her down to keep her from rolling off the bed.

“All I got was this grainy old sixties stuff—old movies or something. Barbie doll chicks wearing pastel minidresses. Guys with those tab collar shirts and greasy-looking suits. Hokey music. Bad acting.” Pam was in the shower talking over the sound of the spray.

Peter was shaving: “Maybe he's working for a movie company in Hollywood. Or a video store.”

“Maybe he's just watching a lot of bad TV.”

“Give it a break; try again tomorrow.”

He tried to play down how useless he felt—without a psychometric link there was nothing he could do to help her. Simon had left nothing behind; not even a scrap of paper, never mind a forwarding address.

Pam and Peter went for a long walk around the grounds of the college, through ankle-high drifts of fallen leaves; the clouds were layered like bunched denim on the horizon and the thin light of evening made them pensive.

“I'm going to give you my book, just in case.”

“What book?”

“The one I—borrowed from that library in New York—the Parapsychology Institute, or whatever it's called. I'm going to let you have it. In case I go first and you can use it as a P-link—to come find me.”

He didn't bother trying to explain how it wouldn't help—that if she disappeared everything else she had ever come into contact with would be shuffled back into the deck—dealt out somewhere else. The book would end up back where it belonged probably—on the shelf in the Archives of the Amer
ican Society for Psychical Research. Undisturbed since the turn of the century. He just took her hand and pulled her close to him; he removed his gloves, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her on the forehead. Her hands found their way under his coat and she pressed her face against his warm chest.

“What makes you think you're at the top of his list?” Peter said after a moment. “
I
could be the next to go. Or maybe he's had enough for now, for
ever
—who knows.”

“'Cause I
do.
The guy's evil.”

“It's evil,” Peter said in a Cockney accent.

“What?” She raised her head to look at his face.

“It's a line from a film. English: a Terry what's-his-name picture, one of the Pythons—called
Time Bandits
—
remember
that one?”

“No. Sorry.”

They walked on, around what used to be the football field, then across the quadrangle to the old library steps. They sat on the low stone wall and watched a gust of wind herd the leaves over the paving stones.

“Don't forget me, okay?” Pam said looking straight ahead.

“I wish I could.”

She frowned at him.

“If you
do
go first, I don't want it to be like the others. I'd rather cut my head off—” He stood up and absently picked a scrap of newspaper from a bush and sent it flying off with the leaves. “I don't know which is worse—losing you and remembering it, or forgetting you altogether.”

“Don't forget me, Peter. You're all I've got! If you forget me, goddam it, I don't exist.”

“Why do you keep insisting
you'll
be the first to go?”

Pam pulled her coat tighter and crossed her arms. “Because.” She turned away from him. “I see you there all the time, you know? A—a con
tin
uous you. Past, present, and future. But a future that comes to a sort of cliff or something—”

“Stop it.”

“So that means I go first, doesn't it? There's no gap, no chunk of time when you're not there, so—”

“
Stop
it.”