A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (17 page)

.
.
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to the end of the rainbow and back again

When someone says “I wish you'd never been born,” for some reason that's not as threatening as saying “I wish you were dead” or “I could kill you.” The notion of somebody never having been born has a kind of benign grace to it—a neutrality, a cleanliness. As if it had to do with sprucing up the past, rather than mucking up the present. With something as tasteless as a corpse. Like abortion without the mess, the guilt. More like contraception really, Simon thought.

I wish you'd never been born.

He said it to himself in the middle of this monologue
Gordon
was hurling at him—a diatribe about honor, and
responsibility
—like he was Simon's fucking father, for God's sake. Unauthorized sessions, remote viewing, corporeal
whatever
—he was going on and on, and Simon just sat there, wanting to read his
Wired
magazine.

“I know what you're up to, man. Shit, you think I'm stupid? After me showing you how to do it with the rod and everything? Larry's been telling me all about it, man. The sessions you showed up in; the ones you're doing after hours. ‘Piggybacking,' they call it.”

“Are you going to tell me you've got my number?” Simon was still looking at his magazine.

“Listen, smart-ass. You signed a contract when you got here just like everyone else. Your fucking around out there in the ether is putting the rest of us at risk. This stuff is like NASA sending someone to the moon—a
very del
icate operation. And you're jeopardizing every one of us. Has that ever crossed your mind? I don't give a shit about
you
—I go out of my way to, to be nice to you for some reason, showing you the trick with the map and—”

“Fuck off; leave me alone.”

Like that for another five minutes or so. Heat, lots of heat; sweat. No touching, though, no pushing and shoving; they both knew better.

They were in the anteroom to one of the labs, early one morning even before any of the techies had arrived; Simon was surprised Gordon had been able to track him down. No one else was around so Simon just let him go on making all these accusations.

Because he was right of course; he
had
been out there on his own, tinkering with things, fine-tuning: the Manson thing and what Larry must have picked up on recently.

Simon had remotely viewed one of the labs—just for fun—showing up right in the middle of one of Peter Abbott's sessions. He'd checked out the coordinates of the guy's target right off the sheet of paper in Jane's pretty little hand. He'd followed him down into the ether and ended up in a place that reminded him of fucking Siberia. And in the file folder on the desk in front of Jane he'd found a list of Peter's previous targets.

A few nights later, just for the hell of it, he'd checked those out too—one right after the other (the few he could keep in his head, at least). It was kind of like doing a marathon: exhausting, but what a trip to see Abbott fumbling around—it was like watching someone trying to thread a needle with boxing gloves on.

And, oh yes: his little trip to New Mexico, “recovering” a treasure someone had originally dug up in 1961.

It had taken Simon three attempts to get it right—this buried-treasure game was a lot more complicated than he'd thought it would be. At first he tried going back to just before the guy who found the stuff arrived on the scene. The account he'd read of the discovery had been quite detailed and Simon located the site in no time at all. The old guy had come up with three small leather sacks of gold nuggets the size of peas, the book said, in the crumbling wall of an adobe mission near Las Cruces.

He found the sacks of gold at the base of the foundation under a mess of broken timbers and rubble where the back wall used to be—there waiting for him. Simon could see his
hand pass through the clay and wood, the gold in the sacks feeling like the taste of buttered corn somehow, dense and rich, sweet. But when he tried shifting to “being-there” mode, his ersatz body pulled him down to a precarious perch on the rubble and he realized right away that it wasn't going to work—not this way; he had nothing to dig with, for one thing; and he doubted he had the strength to hold the manifestation together long enough to dig the gold out and hide it somewhere else—where he could be certain it would remain undetected for another thirty-five years or so.

Reading through Bill Ryan's book again he noticed this time that at one point, after years of following leads and searching through Land Office records and Historical Society files, the guy had been ready to give up. He'd been heading home and stopped in a small-town drugstore to buy his baby sister a birthday card. He'd always remember that day, he said, because it was Veterans Day and he'd tried to mail the card but the post office was closed and he couldn't buy a stamp. Anyway, for the hell of it he asked the woman behind the counter about a lead he'd been tracking for months, and it turned out the old railway worker he was looking for lived with his granddaughter less than two blocks away from where he was standing. This was the turning point supposedly in his search for the Spanish mission treasure: “the linchpin in his chain of clues” was how he put it.

So Simon made a second jump to the drugstore and waited for Bill Ryan—strictly a viewing session this time; he was going to just float on the edge of the ether and eavesdrop. He hung around the ceiling, watching for him through the window. He had time to look over an old '56 Chevy parked outside and check out the magazines and newspapers on the rack near the
door—at least he had the date right. While he was playing at being a see-through balloon a kid came in and bought some multicolored plastic streamers for the handlebars of his bike; he watched him go outside and attach them to the handgrips. Just as Bill Ryan showed up and bought the birthday card.

Simon waited for the right moment, hanging there over
Ryan's
head as he fished out the forty-five cents for the card. The woman in the blue-on-green print dress behind the counter put the card in a paper sack, took his two quarters, and rang it up. She smiled along with the cash register bell—it was a textbook Pavlovian, mindless smile.

He had to decide whose head to mess with. The woman's memory or Bill Ryan's impulse to pose the question?

He was over near the woman now, his ethereal hand close to her graying hair (it was tied in a bun on top of her head). Simon's pseudo-hand brushed against it, passing through the stray hairs that fell around the nape of her neck. He tried telling her she felt nauseous, queasy, a bit dizzy.
Close up the store and put your feet up for a few minutes; get rid of this customer so you can close up. Take an Alka-Seltzer, maybe. It's been a long day. Close up; take a break.
Over and over till the smile faded. He picked up on the state of her life in the process: how important Veterans Day was to her, a son lost in the Korean War, the secret pleasure she took in the attention it brought down on her, this one day of the year when her sorrow could be celebrated.

Her hand came up to her forehead and old Bill Ryan—
Simon
could see his mind working, his body language: just the look on her face was making him change his mind—left the store without saying another word.

Simon had been away from his body for forty minutes or
so and when he came to, he was in a cold sweat. He sat on the bed for a minute; his hands trembling, his mouth dry. He got up and went out to the kitchen, and when he came back he realized the book about Bill Ryan's treasure hunt had disappeared from his nightstand. On the coffee table in the living room he found another paperback—one about a man who had uncovered some of John Dillinger's loot in a tourist cabin near Indianapolis. He'd never seen the thing before, but at the same time he felt he knew pretty well what the book was all about. As if he'd read it already. The two experiences overlapping: reading the Ryan book; reading the one about Dillinger. “Palimpsest” came to mind; the word “palimpsest.” He couldn't quite remember what it meant, but it happened sometimes—words coming to him like that, uninvited.
Party
-crashing words.

An hour later when he felt up to it, he did a real-time remote viewing of the old adobe church. No corporeal manifestation this time, just a ghostly glide-by. The place was still isolated, more devastated than it had been back in 1961, the walls completely gone now, dissolved by the rain and wind. But there they were: the three bags of gold, where they'd been since God-only-knew when, buried near the foundation, waiting for him to go out there just like a regular
down-to-earth
treasure hunter with a real-time rented four-by-four and a real-time, solid, shit-disturbing shovel.

But when he heard Gordon say something about going to let Jane or Eli in on what he was up to, Simon slowly closed his
Wired
magazine, got up from his chair, and left. Not a word. Just a thought:
I wish you'd never been born.

Jane especially. He didn't want him talking to her. He
liked to think Jane thought he was a pretty nice guy; it was a self-image thing—how he saw himself in her eyes. And he wasn't going to let this fucking asshole screw things up at this stage of the game—get him fired. He needed the paycheck. He wouldn't be able to collect his gold without his paycheck.

And he
liked
it here. He was having the best time of his life.

There's an idle threat you hear in movies all the time, usually from thugs with knives in their hands saying it to other thugs played by actors who always disappeared before the end of the first reel: “I'm gonna make you wish you'd never been born.” This had always puzzled Simon; because it was something a guy like Heidegger would have chewed at for hours. The notion that the desire for Non-being could supersede Being no matter how painful it was. Simon had never been into booze or mind-numbing drugs of any sort—maybe that's why he couldn't figure it out. As far as he was concerned, the real injury was in the numbness, the oblivion.

His girlfriend before Betty had liked to read books by Heidegger, and that other one, Wittgenstein—
wear
books by these guys was more like it. She kept one in her purse to read in the lobbies of theaters, or she would leave it spread-
eagled
next to her cappuccino in museum cafeterias while she strolled over for one more little brown packet of unrefined sugar.

He was out in the hall now, but Gordon, always one to fill the air with words, couldn't resist a final volley: “Larry's got footage.”

“What do you mean, footage?”

“Stuff he knows is not his, 'cause when it's coming through, the brain-wave signature changes on the scope.”

“What kind of stuff. Jesus—”

“A kid on a bike, an old car from the fifties, a dolly-shot
kind of view of a dime store or something like that; some stuff that looked like a bomb site, a few bags of gold nuggets or something—that sound familiar?”

Simon turned without saying anything and headed down the hall; and this time Gordon let him go. He passed the door to Jane's office and felt something through it—or sent something through it—because it opened as he got close to it. Jane in her white lab coat today, as if she were an intern doing rounds. Not looking at him, letting him go his own way. Not smiling at him like she usually did.

I wish you'd never been born.

He realized then that he was going to have to pull the plug on poor old Larry too. All of them maybe. Just to get a little slack, that's all he wanted.
Just cut me a little slack.

So he could go about his business gathering together what was rightfully his.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of—well, just the pursuit, for now. The Happiness would come later.

.
.
.
dousing the flaming dowser

I'd be doing the world a favor—one less mouth sucking back veggie Big Macs and cases of Fruitopia, or whatever that New Age Coca-Cola piss is called; one less asshole to clean up after.
Simon heading for his apartment, his
Wired
magazine a tube of bruised paper. Slapping. Things in his way.

Nineteen fifty-six. Memphis, Tennessee. Well, Bartlett, Tennessee, really—close enough. Down the road a piece. The year Elvis did his screen test for Paramount—a scene from
The Rainmaker.
Lost footage; no one knew where it was.
Maybe they should send Larry back there to reshoot it.
Simon
locked his door, closed the blinds, unplugged the phone; he checked the door again, telling himself out loud it was locked. He remembered the dehydration problem and went back out to the kitchen for a bottle of mineral water.

He lay down on the bed and tried to relax, telling himself it wasn't murder, it was contraception. Gordon Quarendon should never have been born. No one could argue with that, except maybe his cat.

February 4, 1956. His parents' wedding night in a hotel just outside Memphis. Retro-contraception. The guy had told him this the day he'd shown him how to dowse maps—how he'd been conceived on his parents' wedding night—and for some reason this piece of trivia had actually taken root in Simon's memory. Serendipity.
Thank you, Jesus.

There was a wind this time, in the ether; he had never felt anything like it before. Eddies, currents, slowing him down, making him aware of the process—the getting there, the getting back. His body lost in the confusion. No kinetic memory working for him this time, his arms and legs disoriented, where his tongue should be, his spleen—just this bulging approximation of himself in transition, fighting something, tracking through something. Akimbo. Nothing like the graceful, effortless dive he was used to.
I am too angry to be doing this; I should have waited, calmed down a bit. What's the rush anyway? Now, next week—the departure date's irrelevant.

A sudden shock wave of consequence, a crease in the fabric of things. A deflection. Currents pulling him away—from himself, from who he was,
what
he was, is, and ever shall be.
Pace it. Turn it into a song. Sing yourself through it: “
Blackbird
”
—a one-and-a-half pike.

A pulling back, a recovery; angle of incidence equals angle
of—the leading edge of the projectile that was Simon Hayward breaking through the meniscus. A fish out of water . . .

Simon with a body now, a concoction of a body, strobing—massive, massless, massive, massless—a rhythmic raspberry of on/off, on/off existence. Stuttering into a solid here and now. But where the fuck was he? In a room that looked nothing like a bridal suite, no couple humping in a froufrou bed. No discarded tuxedo jacket with its dosimeter-like boutonniere wilted from exposure to all that good cheer: reception lines and flashbulbs.

This was the deal. He had planned to show up just as Gordon came to pass, came to be. Just before his spry young dad, blindsided by cheap champagne and pancreas-killing wedding cake, would do the dirty deed. He was going to grab the guy by the balls or something—he hadn't really worked it out. Get into his head; or her head—make her think the bridegroom smelled like a potato on the verge of becoming a maggot day-care center. Deconstruct his erection to start with, and make sure it stayed that way. It would have been relatively easy—just a matter of timing.

Which brought him back to the situation at hand: something had brought him here, something had deflected him away from his target—to this place that smelled like talcum powder and leftover broccoli. A branch of his own family tree in the way, maybe, somehow interwoven with Gordon and his parents. There was something about the night of Gordon's conception that was instrumental in the outcome of his own life line. That's what all the turbulence had been about, he figured. His struggle to hold on to some semblance of himself. Being/Non-being.

A baby's nursery. At night. The baby asleep here some
where, he knew that. But when and where? He moved slowly about the small room, getting the feel of the place, his footing. His sense of himself stabilizing, locking into corporeality. Solid. Securely solid. It had never felt so real before—he was probably getting better at it. A master of corporeal manifestation in the past. He should ask Eli for a diploma when he got back: Simon Hayward, MCMP.

Okay, here we go . . .
On the dresser next to the baby oil and the Q-tips. A picture of a newborn's faceless face that was interchangeable with every other day-old baby picture. We are the world. The front of the card with its oval cutout, framed in bedtime-story ribbons and teddy bears, the handwritten words on the appropriate lines: NAME: Gordon Douglas Quarendon. DATE OF BIRTH: November 2, 1956. WEIGHT: 6 lb. 7 oz.

The kid in the crib didn't look like the picture, but the chances of—no. It had to be him. Shit. Nine fucking months late. Twelve months maybe—what did he know about newborn babies? What they looked like after two, three . . . twenty weeks, for that matter.

He looked out the window. A street like the baby picture—it could be anywhere in the country, anytime in the last half of the twentieth century. Urban sprawl. At first glance the car parked out front looked like a huge Volkswagen bug—
something
from the early fifties, no doubt. Extinct. Pre-fin. The road was slick with recent rain, streetlights showing up the puddles, the water beading on the windshield—could this be Memphis in November? Elvis out there somewhere keeping the rain off his mom, showing her Graceland. His daddy hanging back, knowing his place.

I wish you'd never been born.
Elvis a twin. Half of the set.

What to do? He could pull back home and try again later, try for just before the wedding night maybe, but that could put him in more danger than he was in now. He could feel something already.
I do not belong here.
The shift in the state vector, as Eli or Blimpo Blenheim called it, playing with the flow of things.
The longer I'm here the greater the chance . . .
A flicker of something then—not light but darkness, a strobing. The ballast of his body attenuating for an instant, spreading his center of gravity across the floor.

Get on with it. Over beside the crib now; in the faint street-lamp light he could make out a baby on its stomach (begging for crib death; that's what his sister had told him—the latest findings—but what did they know back then? Doctor Spock still just a doctor), head like a grapefruit, no ponytail yet, his only dowsing rod between his legs. A warm little thing, waiting for life to happen. Caught up in his fluffy blanket; its shape a Rosetta stone of baby REM sleep.
Terry
-cloth warm, fresh urine warm. Simon could smell it now, this close, as he touched the skin where Gord's clenched fist made tiny shapes out of his folded-up pinky finger. Put its life in order—retro-retro-contraception.

Fuck, what the hell.
I wish you'd never been born.
Grabbing the blanket, making a tool out of it, a stopper. A fluffy stopper.
I'm mending a hole where the air gets in . . .

Gently turning its soft little head around. Oh God, don't wake up. Eyes on him, begging. Gordon's eyes; Gordon's witchy, number-hungry eyes.
Thanks, Gordon. Thanks for the memories. Your number's up, man.

Don't look, just feel. Like wrapping fruit—oh shit he's crying.