A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (29 page)

.
.
.
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?—ex
act
ing 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 with 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 en
vironmentalists 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.”

He leaned forward again, his hands flat on the desk this time; the moisture from his skin made Kirlian arcs of misted glass around each finger. “Look at it this way. Here we are sitting here, right? Talking. Let's suppose you decide to stand up right now and—I don't know; you're pissed off for some reason—punch me in the face.” His thumbs came up. “
Or,
you just sit there and we carry on like we are now; you get steamed but we talk things through, work things out. Now think about it. What's the difference in the long run? Nothing really. You take a swing at me, I'm pissed with you for a while; you feel bad about it—quit maybe; I have to get a tooth capped or something—so what? Minor stuff as far as the big picture's concerned.”

He leaned back and ran both hands gently over his hair—Jeff liked his hair; it was one of his proud possessions: the thickness of it, the texture. Peter didn't know if this was unconscious fussing or ostentatious preening. Jeff yawned and put his hands behind his head. “We just make sure you go far enough back in time so it really doesn't affect anything. The universe'll get over it.” He smiled as if he had made some sort of wise observation about things in general; after the meeting was over Peter figured he would probably jot it down somewhere to use in a meeting with the theory guys, or the board of directors.

Peter remembered what Eli used to say about “corporeal manifestation in the past,” that it was a tear in the fab
ric of things; how a ripple could grow into a tidal wave of
consequence
—part of him remembered it—the part connected to the strand of his past life with Pam, the part of him that couldn't remember the ants in the Dalí painting.
A tear in the fabric of things
—he wondered how Simon perceived all this—his take on it—in light of all the shit he was responsible for.

He remembered too how Ron Koch had broken the rule about not interfering with your own time line and gone back to a point in his own life and—Ron Koch. The name seemed wrong—as if his powers of even recognizing that his memory was bad had failed him too.

I have been there already; I know how much damage can be done,
he wanted to tell Jeff.
Many times, sixty-three times, to be exact—or was it a hundred and twenty-seven? Two to the power of how many changes?
He wondered again how much of it had actually happened, how much of it was delusion. But even the word “happen” didn't seem to have much substance anymore.
It's all in your head; nothing out there has any meaning.

Jenny had decided that his delusions were a side effect of his prolonged exposure to the ether. He had sat her down in his apartment one evening with a fresh cup of mint tea—they had spent the day hiking through the ribbon of woodland that followed the Buffalo River—and tried to tell her about the parallel strands of experience that wound through his mind; but as the words left his lips he found himself dissembling, and trivializing what had been the bane of his every waking moment. The confession had diffused it all somehow and reduced it to a clinical anomaly that could be treated with an ounce of skepticism and a pound of distraction.

Traveling back in time (not just as an observing presence but actually going there, physically): he knew it could be done. There was no doubt in his mind. He knew it
had
been done, and who had been doing it. And what the consequences were. And now PsiberTech wanted him to do it too.

“What about the side effects?”

“A few—little green men.”

“Pardon?”

“‘Elves,' they call them.” Jeff was looking in his desk for something now. He came up with another file. “Hallucinations involving contact with small multidimensional creatures, friendly elf-like beings—something like that.”

“In the ether? Or in the mind of the operative?”

“We don't know—the test subjects weren't like you. None of them are psychic—no RV experience. In fact, that's why we used them. We wanted a control group.”

“Is that what it's really all about? The spirit world? Tracking down these elf creatures?”

Jeff waved him off and shook his head. He slid the new file over to Peter. “Here, take a look at this.”

Inside was an old photograph of a group of men
standing
—some sitting—along what looked like a fence or a couple of sawhorses end-to-end; there was a rug draped over the top of whatever the wooden structure was. From the style of the clothes: morning coats and high collars, a few top hats—Peter figured it was probably taken some time in the last century. A man sitting on the extreme left was studying a large open book. The whole thing looked posed but it had a freshness you don't see in many pictures of the same era. It looked familiar, but these days everything looked familiar to Peter.

“This was taken in 1843 by a man named Carl Ferdinand
Stelzner, one of the first men in Germany to use the daguerreotype process. He was a painter before he became a photographer. ‘An itinerant miniaturist,' I think it says here—anyway, we know exactly when he took it and where. It's known as
The Hamburg Art Club's Outing.
Fifteen men—artists, writers, a few hangers-on. We even know the names of some of them.” He leaned over and rested his index finger on the back row. “See this space here? We want you right there. Next to this guy.” He was pointing to a man facing right; his hand was on the shoulder of the man sitting before the open book. “Just for a minute or so,” Jeff said. “You're going to be number sixteen.”

Peter remembered something and then it was gone—something to do with Eli again. Eli Thornquist. A meeting with Eli, something to do with an old photograph—and then it was gone past him, like a speeding train, or buried under the multiplying layers of conflicting recollections. His head began to ache again. He needed a glass of water.

What Jeff hadn't told him the day he agreed to be part of the time travel experiment was that the drug would have to be taken in a series of increasing dosages; an intramuscular injection every eight hours for a week leading up to liftoff—that's what they called it: “liftoff.”

The first thing he noticed after the first one was the voices, the steady background drone that filled his head like a loud air conditioner, a roar of white noise that started to fragment into discrete sounds—laughter and whispers. He would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with the lips of someone he had never met next to his ear—that's how it felt; as if the person behind the lips were in bed with him instead
of Jenny. Filling his head with whispers and gasps and squeaking incoherencies.