A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (12 page)

I guess they
can
take that away from me . . .

“Ron's gone.” Anita woke up crying in the night saying this. And thinking,
This is like forgetting a mantra.
The light through the blinds was a predawn husk of itself. She had been dreaming about a man she desperately loved; a semblance of a man she had once known, or would know someday, but he was nameless, faceless; the feel of his skin the only thing that would distinguish him. The sound of his voice.

Ron's gone.

The part of her she devoted to a circular whispered melody, an enchanted rondeau she transmitted to the world—all about
her new lover, Ron Koch—at some point during the night it had been shut down.
She
had shut it down, out of necessity or a sense of guilt. This new allegiance to the dreamt-up incubus had driven him out of her mind.

Ron's gone.
As the room brightened with the solid verbs and nouns of the waking world, none of it made any sense. The skein of prayer she wrapped him in seemed worthless now, unraveled.

In her work back home, touching a toy or a piece of jewelry opened up a torrent of rushing squeals and smells and flashing colors—so she rolled over and buried her face in the other pillow. Nothing: a blackboard wiped clean, faint smudges of words fading as she tried to decipher them. Gone, but not gone. Like a stroke victim she had no utterance for it—this hole in her scheme of things that shouted at her without words.

Later when people were up and about she confronted them. “Ron. Where's Ron Koch? He—he's not in his room.” She had checked: two flights up from hers, at the end of the hall—a corner unit; he'd liked it because it had views in two directions. The door was half open; a maid was in there making up the bed, and a man in the bathroom was laying in new tiles around the shower stall. He said he'd been at it for three days.

The concierge, the man who ordered taxis and arranged dinner reservations—she liked him; he always had a smile for her. But this time he was deferential—
professionally
deferential
—and frowning at her, pointing with his stubby finger at a list he kept taped to the counter next to his telephone. No “Ron Koch.” No one on staff had ever heard of him.

Back in her room she tried to smoke a cigarette. She knew
she wasn't crazy. Maybe it was one of Calliope's elaborate experiments; they were testing her resolve, her instincts. She wandered about the apartment, circled the coffee table. She felt caged in the absurdity of it. On the bathroom vanity she found her brand-new jar of aloe vera skin cream (she really had to work at opening it, till it popped like a dropped tennis ball), the untouched swirl under the lid—virgin. There was no scent of him in her bed, she could barely remember his face—just the dream of the counterfeit, the incubus that had garbled her mantra and driven him away.

“I want all the others interviewed. Separately. Then a group meeting in the common room,” Blenheim said. Anita was sitting with a cup of ginseng tea Jane had given her. “Tell me again please, Anita.” He had one of his yellow pads in front of him.

“His name is Ronald Koch.” Her voice rose into the register of impending sobs and she damped it down with a swallow of tea. “About fifty, fifty-five, heavyset, oh, five six, five seven. Jesus, you must have all this—you hired him, for God's sake! He came in about three weeks ago, a couple of days after I got here. From Canada. Toronto, I think it was—no, Hamilton. He lives in Hamilton now.”

“He was never here, Anita. We've never even heard of the man,” Blenheim said as Jane turned away to use the phone.

Gordon Quarendon was the first one to be interviewed: “Ron? Sure. What about Ron?” There was no doubt in his mind. A fellow recruit in his mid-fifties, short, nervous type. Into horses in a big way—a professional handicapper from Canada. “His numbers are kind of iffy,” he said, looking at Jane as if he were passing on privileged information.

“What do you mean, ‘iffy'?” Blenheim said. They were in his office but he was peering into a drawer as if he'd never opened it before.

“Born June eighteenth, forty-five. Comes out to a six, which is, you know, balance, harmony, which is fine in itself but it doesn't jibe with his name, ‘Ronald Koch,' which works out to be a two: duality, ambiguity.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Numerology. I
live
by it, man. I—”

“How do you know his birth date?”

“I asked him.”

Jane put her hand over the mouthpiece. “He's right. Just got word from Sandra. She's tracked down a Ronald Koch, born in Toronto, June eighteenth, 1945.”

“There you go,” Quarendon said, swinging his chair round so he could stretch out.

“Died May nineteenth, 1973,” Jane said.

“Nineteen seventy-three? That's crazy. I spoke to him yesterday.”

“The records show he died in his sleep—an aneurysm behind the left eye. He was overweight, smoked three packs a day, supposedly. ‘Natural causes' on the death certificate.”

When it was his turn, Peter came into Blenheim's office thinking it was all about his session with the crashed 747. Blenheim was sitting on the edge of his desk, and before Peter sat down he handed him a small scratch pad and told him to make a list of the other recruits in the order he had met them.

After a minute or two of scribbling and crossing out and repositioning names, he handed it back to Blenheim. “What's this all about?”

Blenheim took a deep breath. “Just tell me about—” He glanced at Peter's list. “Ronald Koch.”

This was later, in the common room: the couches and chairs seemed askew in the way that a body's posture is undone by sudden death.

“I have a vague impression of someone else, another recruit like yourselves—not a specific one, more like—as if there's a gap here, in this room full of people.” Eli Thornquist was pacing. No one said anything; no one else moved. Anita was smoking in here but no one said anything about it—allowing her this transgression. She seemed calmer now, almost at ease in the midst of them all—an acknowledged loss, easier to deal with, Peter figured.

Eli turned back toward them. “But that could be attributed to the fact that you are all attuned to this missing person; you're all thinking about him, and I'm picking up on it. The
es
sence of Ronald Koch if not the
sub
stance.”

Jane spoke up then; she'd been going over notes she'd pulled from her briefcase. “We think this Ronald Koch tried something he wasn't supposed to. He did something risky and ended up doing himself in.”

“What do you mean, ‘risky'?” Simon Hayward asked from the back of the room; the rest of them turned to look—at the kid that hardly spoke to anyone, except to contradict them. Even Quarendon found it hard to make conversation with the guy. Even Pamela thought he was a jerk, and she got along with everyone.

Peter put it down to his youth; he could forgive him his youthful arrogance (the way he broke into other people's con
versations, as much as saying, “I know that; in fact I know more about it than you”), but there comes a time when an asshole must eventually be seen for what he is—an asshole, pure and simple. He wasn't a kid anymore.

“From what we've pieced together, it seems that Ronald Koch interfered with his own life line,” Blenheim said.

“Just before he disappeared Anita says he was spending a lot of time thinking about a period in his life—” It was Jane speaking again; she moved over to where Anita was sitting and put a hand on her shoulder. “An incident he felt didn't turn out the way he would have liked it to. You know: ‘If I could do it all over again I wouldn't do that, I'd do this'—that kind of thing. He was reminiscing about a time when he could have made a lot of money betting on a longshot. Anita says he told her the exact date—the day of the running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico, the year a horse named”—she checked her notes—“Secretariat won. Nineteen seventy-three. It turns out he died in the early hours of that very morning.”

“If he supposedly died back then, how do we know this guy—why do we remember him and not you?” Gordon said.

“You people are all exceptionally gifted sensitives—that could have something to do with it. Or maybe the fact you've all traveled through the ether, accessed information no one else is privy to.”

“Or you're picking it up from Anita, who was especially close to him,” Jane said.

Eli was facing them now, leaning against the big TV set. “Somehow he went beyond mere observation. From what Anita tells us, he was capable of it—from a session that supposedly took place a few days ago. To the Rose Bowl Parade or—” Anita said something and Eli corrected himself.
“Thank you. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade—okay, well. It sounds like he was on the verge of a full-blown corporeal manifestation. So he was capable of it, and probably not in control of it. Anyway, if he materialized even on a modest level—visual, auditory, it doesn't matter—if there was a transfer of information, with himself, he was in jeopardy of what we call ‘implosion.'”

“There must have been a point where he was in two places at once—two
times,
” Blenheim said. “Oscillating between them, expanding the probabilities of his life line into an extremely unstable dual-reality state. In that situation, something's got to give. Something has to collapse.” He got up from his perch on the edge of the table. “Even if he'd shown up a thousand miles away he could have set up the same
dynamic
—not as catastrophic; more like a slow burn, but just as destructive.

“The classic time travel paradox sets up a negative-feedback loop. In most cases, the subject would have failed—and survived—and the outcome would fall in the other direction: no transfer of information to his younger self, and the universe unfolds as it should. But obviously this Ron Koch interfered in a way that was extreme enough for the dynamics of the healing process to step in and eliminate the irritant, at the point of transgression. Like all natural systems it's very economical; it takes the path of least resistance—it will only terminate the time traveler's life at the latest possible point on his or her life line—”

Thornquist broke in here: “This being Ron Koch on the night in question, when was it? Nineteen seventy-three? The young Ron Koch must have learned something that changed the future of the older Ron—which in turn would affect a whole lot of
other
life lines. And the obverse is true
too,
of
course—the elimination of him at this point would affect the lives of all the people he subsequently came in contact with; but again, the path of least resistance—”

“He could have touched himself.” Pamela was curled up in one of the bucket chairs at the back of the room near the French doors, away from Simon, away from everyone. “I'm just thinking out loud. If he touched himself, maybe tried to wake himself up, that would do it, wouldn't it? He wouldn't have to say anything. Just create this memory that echoed back and forth through time.” They seemed to take note of what she was saying and Larry coughed. He'd decided that since Anita was smoking, he could have a cigarette too.

“The bottom line seems to be,” Jane said, “you mess with history, the universe will swallow you up. If there are any rules to this game, this is the cardinal one—stay away from your own life line, and not just your birth date either; you would have to go back nine months before that, before you were conceived.”

Jane Franklin seemed on the verge of scolding them all, like a schoolteacher would. But they were adults, and with Anita in the state she was, it seemed to Peter she was deciding on a bit of friendly if not professional advice instead: “I just urge you all to refrain from any unauthorized sessions. No flying solo. You people are on the cutting edge of this technology, and I want you to think about where that expression came from—‘cutting edge.' You've got to treat it with respect. We're playing with sharp knives here, very sharp knives.”

And just like a schoolteacher, as if Peter had seen it coming, she dug into her briefcase and came up with homework. She placed a stack of documents on the table beside the coffee machine. “I want you to take some time to look at these
guidelines we've drawn up. But I stress, once again, please, no unauthorized sessions. No unassisted remote viewing, no unsupervised out-of-body stuff, all right? Not even any deep relaxation exercises. That's it for now.” She looked at Eli and Mike Blenheim—neither had anything more to say. “We'll see you all tomorrow morning then. Thank you.”

Simon Hayward was up to the front of the class before she finished speaking. He skirted the congestion around Anita and headed right for the stack of guidelines. He passed Pam on the way out and did a little mock sword fight around her head with his rolled up pages. She slowly pushed one half of her hair behind her ear and just looked at him till he left the room.

Nightmare on Elm Street:
The Prequel . . .

“There are thousands of people out there who are obsessed with this sort of thing, as you know. The Lone Gunman Theory, the Conspiracy, both sides—they can't let it go. And this client in particular—well, he has the money to keep us on retainer. He wants us to sort of check in on the event every now and then, with different approaches of course, different
operatives
—so now it's your turn, Peter.” Eli Thornquist looked odd at this angle, peering at him from above and behind the recliner, moving as he spoke, his lower teeth crooked and stained. Peter hadn't noticed that before.

“He just wants to know what really happened—no ax to grind. He
says
he has no ax to grind. No agenda. Dallas, Dealey Plaza, around noon on November twenty-second, 1963—just your impressions.” Eli smiled and patted Peter on the thigh, rougher than he had to, overcompensating, Peter figured. “Back before you were born, I guess.”

“Not quite. I must have been about eight or nine months old by then.”

“A baby. You will never know what that day meant to so many people.” He looked off into the corner for a moment. “Or maybe you will.”

Deep steady breathing taking him down into the hypnagogic; he was learning to fly with his toes trailing through the surface of sleep. In his head, soprano and distant, Jane Franklin's lulling words: . . .
let me tell you where we are going today.
The ganzfeld goggles seemed heavy. The filtered light seemed blood pink—flashlight-through-baby-fingers pink—against a white horizonless sea. Figure/ground.
Me against everything else.

Peter was immersed and lost for a while, then dragged back up above the surface—by the thing in his hand they had given him to use like the pen from the session to Chicago, like the tray fragment from the downed 747. His “psychometric link.”

It was a book this time, an old math book, fifties vintage—something for kids in grade school.

Where are we going today? We are taking you to Texas . . .

Down again, falling backwards, letting the book lead him out of himself.

We are targeting a point in the past, Peter. The time coordinate is right about when you were born.
He heard this in his
head as if Eli Thornquist's mouth were next to his ear. But the voice was really his mind sorting through the scant data that wafted his way. It was a mirage of a conversation: the information was going directly to his short-term memory; the voice merely a virtual voice.

Jane's voice now telling him,
You are heading for the Lone Star State, Peter. Dallas. Book the flight, book the flight and fall in love, fall. Into Love. (Singing now): “Do you ken John K. with his head so low .
.
.
Do ken John, do you ken John Ken John Ken
. .
.”

He is on the floor, his remote eyes at knee level, where the book is, was. Grime, cardboard dust. Grit against his virtual cheek. The sour sweet rotting potato smell of decaying flesh—a mouse or a bird carcass somewhere nearby. Hidden in a corner, he could see it for an instant—feathers shrouding bones. Definitely a bird—alive with decomposition.

The book in his hands is married to a book in the box, identical but time-vectored apart; in a cardboard carton of twenty-four piled on a skid: six layers of five, stacked like interlocking bricks. There it is—in the left carton of the first tier.

But at the same time, back in Calliope's lab, clutched to Peter's chest. The one in his hands aged by countless tiny fingers flipping pages—the typography is eye-eroded. The pages are child-weary—with tears, spit, pressed noses, flecks of dry ketchup black as old blood, earwax. It is graffitied with heart-caged declarations of love, epithets scrawled with naive élan, lewd and grotesque amendments to illustrations of Happy American Children doing Math-competent American Things.

Here in the Texas School Book Depository the copy is pristine, virgin—owned only by the children in the pictures—redolent of new bookness.

Peter can see a high-beamed ceiling above the tiers of cartons; a wooden two-wheeler in the corner by the window; a table by the door with a hot plate, a coffeepot—the tabletop is sugared and creamed, stenciled with rings, coffee cup rings (arrayed in a fleeting allusion to the logo of the Olympic Games). If he were there in the flesh he would be filling his lungs with an amalgamated scent of baked dust, sweet new paper, printer's ink, old coffee.

And cigarette smoke.

A man is standing by the window; the edge of sunlight cuts across the wood floor, across the toes of his shoes. He is looking out on Dealey Plaza as if he were about to find something in the view—a message, a meaning.

The faint hiss of his final drag. The gentle timpani of his black shoes on the rough wood floor. Army issue: shoes made to be worn out. He is perspiring as he opens the window—a sash window that sticks for a second before fitfully giving in, and grinding its way open. Peter can smell the man's sweat; he can see his white rayon shirt yellowed at the armpits.

The man drops his cigarette butt and goes back behind a row of cartons. Brown paper in his hands now, a package as long as a golf club, something wrapped like a gift. Brown paper and string. He is pulling at the end of it, tearing at the paper with a Christmas-morning absorption—metal. Gun-gray. The point of the gun is blunt. To the point.

Words in Peter's head:
6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-
Carcano
, 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, 6.5-
millimeter
Mannlicher
-Carcano, 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano,
Mannlicher
-Carcanomannlicher-Carcanomannlichercarcano
. . . like a voodoo chant tearing him away . . .

Down, through the floor, six floors . . . down

Peter is outside in the bright noon sunlight. Crowds of people line the street, women wearing hats, as if on the way to church, men wearing ties over white short-sleeved shirts, fedoras. Cigars. Sunglasses. The sound of motorcycles moves closer; he picks up the scent of grass clippings among sparse trees, a picket fence in shade above and behind the gathering onlookers. The picket fence abuts an overpass. Over more shade—a boundary of darkness.

Someone is there with Peter, from his side of things, from his side of history, from Peter's own world—Peter knows this without seeing him; it is a man: a young, angry man. His face is pixilated, blurred out of recognition. His presence is like the intrusion of phony flavor in good coffee.

Where are we going today?
Peter hears this new voice close to his ear. (It is a cross-dressed parody of Jane's voice.) It is coming from the flip side, the back lot of what he is remotely viewing here in Dallas. But at the same time, this other person is saying these words, vocalizing them from the scene below. He is solid, substantial, part of it all. There. In the flesh. Oscillating between the two—there and not there. The male figure pulsates and flickers as it fades in and out of the ether; rising and turning like an evolving smoke ring. He smiles and winks at Peter, pirouettes and somersaults in a slow free-fall dance. There is the glint of something moving with him, something inanimate, but Peter only sees it as a degraded mosaic of light and dark. (It is, in fact, a gold chain and the likeness of a saint free-falling with the intruder—blessing his journey.)

To the people on Elm Street all this state vector flip-flop is time-dilated into one smudged flash—much like a puff of smoke.

The figure is stable now—sitting cross-legged on the verge of grass, on the grassy knoll, looking in the direction of the approaching parade of vehicles; motorcycles; fancy old limos blue-black and fin-blunted with importance, stars and stripes on tiny flags, the presidential standard—their headlights are puny sparks against the blaring sunlight. Moving slow as a funeral.

Where are we going today?
His mocking voice is in Peter's head; at the same time it solidifies into real speech, as real as the roar of engines and the trickling pitter-patter of outdoor clapping. He is lying on the grass now, in the camouflage of fluttering tree shade, looking down on the scene below, his head just over the crest of the knoll. In the flesh, part of the scene; but his voice is still in Peter's head:
Fancy meeting you here! Peter Abbott: COME ON DOWN!

For Peter, there is a pull like a net of fingers dragging him down out of the ether all of a sudden, a collapse into
elsewhere
—a condensation of himself, a state change: gas to solid, reverse sublimation, from the sublime to the . . . a wrenching struggle, two places at once, two times . . .
No, I cannot be here. I
am
here already, in the flesh, a small baby somewhere in Cleveland. I could do myself in—like Ron Koch.

The open limo passes by like a compressed précis dream of the Zapruder film. JFK and Jackie doing the scene as if it were a cheap knockoff of the real thing—too clean and crisp. It lacks the grittiness of peripheral documentation, the cool side-glance mystery and the sexy noise of 8mm footage. Oliver Stone would never do it like this—the soundtrack is empty, metronomeless, unpaced. The gunshots are like distant, cartoon, champagne-cork poppings; people just stand
there staring from the side of the road, extras not doing their job. Some of them pull focus: a kid fights with his little sister.

Simon lies in the shadows of the fence and the trees pointing at the street, at the passing Lincoln convertible in a playful mime of shooting: he is one-eyed squinting down the length of his arm, his index finger. His index finger is as blunt as the point of a gun. His thumb is cocked; his mouth is mouthing a gunshot—a backwards kiss. Just as the last shot comes down out of the sky.

He looks up at Peter's revolving, flickering presence and smiles. He is trying his best to look like Robert De Niro in
Taxi Driver
—that scene where he pretends to blow his brains out.