A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (18 page)

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.
.
the perfect moment

The wind was a breeze this morning, a butterfly flutter of a breeze. Peter, Anita, and Gordon were sitting together having breakfast out on the terrace. The table's disorder was precise, infinitely defined: the scatter of dishes on the white tablecloth; the startling orange of Peter's juice. Gordon's hand brushed against his crumpled napkin and it gently opened; the inhaled light carved shadows in a ceaseless calculus of readjustments.

Peter was suddenly struck by the perfection of it all, and his awareness of the moment made it even more piquant—the savoring almost as good as the thing savored. He thought about
Pam then, wanting to share it with her. As he closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun he could feel the damp warmth of her breathing on his pillow. In that instant Pam murmured something and turned in the sheets like a dolphin, then settled back to float in a new pool of sleep.

Simon Hayward was nowhere to be seen this morning—thank God, Peter thought. That probably had a lot to do with it—the pleasure of the moment. The kid with his adult newspaper who walked through rooms as if floors and ceilings had been his idea and he should be getting some kind of residual check for letting everyone use the place.

The waiter, a young man in a sky-blue golf shirt, began clearing away the dishes: Peter's toast; the remnants of Anita's fruit salad with its ceremonial, seldom-eaten lettuce leaf furling and frothing like a Japanese wave woodcut—white-capped with sticky crumbs of cottage cheese.

Gordon had eaten enough pancakes for all of them, as if it were Shrove Tuesday and this would be the Lent of all Lents. Talking between—around—every mouthful, he'd recounted his confrontation with Simon. His hazel eyes picked up the greens and blues of his Mondrian-gridded shirt. They were wide with adrenaline—and sugar, maple sap all the way from Quebec, northern sun transformed by the Kodak of leaves into anger. His plate was a sheen of butter and syrup, the rim dribbled with a sepia Jackson Pollock.

Anita was speaking now, and as a way of fighting the compulsion to light a cigarette she was leaning on her elbows with her hands under her chin—together, the way one would shake the wrong hand: knuckles to palm. She was telling a story from back when she was a structural engineer.

“—so when he did
that
, I said, ‘Hold on, fella, our mandate
here, our contract is an
inspection
contract—pure and simple. What's actually
wrong
with the goddam footings's nothing to do with us—'” She used her smoker's rattle to punctuate the narrative, her breathing as a phoneme. She looked back and forth between Gordon and Peter; they obligingly smiled—one nodded, the other shook his head—in a mutually comforting acknowledgment of the “People-Are-Stupid” parable.

Peter rubbed the stiffness in the back of his neck and thought about tennis: how it kills the body as it invigorates it—tit for tat, fitness karma, a flash of something about a universal standard of physical well-being—the pleasure/pain constant; Pam in his bed next to him like a glorious addition to his own body versus a limb that can walk off by itself leaving a ragged, bleeding stump—and then turned his attention back to what Anita was saying.

Gordon was looking at Anita's hands, at the jaundiced index finger of the right one, trying to picture the color of her lungs, wondering why someone with gifts like hers would choose to—

“So they stiff us for the thirty-five thousand and we end up taking them to court.” She coughed like a hooka pipe. “I don't think any money's changed hands even yet and I left the company three years ago—”

Gordon leaned back, making his chair rock on its hind legs, and said: “Now this is really interesting—you mention the number thirty-five thousand, well, I think that's your problem right there—with that kind of number hanging over the poor guy's head no wonder he stiffed you. Any number with a thirty-five, wow—it's got a black cloud hanging over it. It's screaming ‘downer,' if you know what I mean. Now let me give you an example of a complete reverse situation. I read some
where recently that one out of every hundred and sixty-seven American males is in jail. That's astounding when you think about it—” Gordon was wearing a bow tie this morning, a silvery satin bow tie with an ordinary plaid shirt. “One out of a hundred and sixty-seven—you'd think that would be a no-win kind of situation, but apart from, you know, the fact that all these guys are in jail and everything, you could put a real positive spin on it if you just take a look at the numbers for a second. I mean, you take a one and a six and a seven, you get fourteen, which of course reduces down to a five—”

A ripple, a tremor—through the ether. A fold.

“—but that's what this project is all about. Predictable returns. You have to keep the shareholders happy,” Jane said, taking her napkin from her lap; her pancakes were hardly touched. She dabbed at her lips and looked over at Larry. He was wearing the straw hat he'd bought at the market in Philipsburg; his hand, the one with the missing fingers, was absently scratching his stomach, and she tried not to stare. Instead she turned her face into the sun and let her eyes close . . .
this is good, this casual breakfast thing, our five operatives: Larry, Peter, Anita—well, three of them anyway, Pam like a delicate flower, needing special care, extra sleep, solitude; and Simon: what he needed was a kick in the butt .
.
.
she didn't want to think about that right now—all here together: the family thing; Eli should be here too .
.
.
or maybe not, the way he looks at Peter sometimes, off-putting; God, I hate eggs in the morning. Why do I let myself be talked into it . . .

Pam is preparing a dream, a dessert of a dream, folding ingredients into a whipped batter base—vanilla eyes, coconut skin. A waiter paces; he is waiting for her to finish so he can
serve it. He wants to know what it's called, what to put on the chalkboard out front. Today's special: a
Peter Pavlova Pamcake—a Peter pamcake, a Peter Pan Cake,
her mouth is trying to get around the words. The waiter has a ponytail and he's wearing a tuxedo shirt and cummerbund—a black bow tie. With a wooden spoon she is beating in a whipped cream of Peter's words, his voice like lemon juice, then syrup, then melted butter; his thick dark hair like shavings of chocolate; the scent of him, saffron and Crayola crayons. The warmth of his chest against her cheek—
I can't eat this; it's too rich for me,
she is saying now, telling the waiter to take it away; his bow tie is expanding and turning like a propeller, slowly, so that the vanes pass in front of his face and brush his lips like a napkin. Each cycle moving things along like a slide show clicking to the next one . . .
this is from last summer: my brother in Rome in front of the Spanish Steps
(click) . . .
here's me and Peter in that shoe store where the owner kept telling me how much I looked like his daughter . . .
(click)
this is a bunch of us at Mullet Bay beach; that's Peter on the end . . .
(click)
this is Peter having breakfast with Anita and
. . . (click)

Simon says, “Do this .
.
.
Do that
. .
.”

It was like a hangover—the headache, the muzzy corona of bland glare that circled everything he looked at. Simon lay on the bed for a few more minutes thinking about what he had just done—or thought he'd just done—the stink of baby shit still with him.
In your head,
he told himself.
You couldn't have brought it back with you.
Raising his arm to smell his armpit. No. That was something else—honest sweat from an honest day's work.
Plugging a hole where the air gets it. Fixing an asshole.
He told himself again how he had done the world a favor. “Gordon Quarendon—an asshole with a capital ‘O,'”
he said out loud, coughing through the end of it. His throat dry, feeling worked over, as if he'd been screaming.

Simon got off the bed and had a shower; he put on a fresh shirt and a pair of jeans, a clean pair of sweat socks—he couldn't find his shoes. They were not where he'd left them; and were at the same time—in his mind, two sets of shoes. It was as if he knew where they were but chose not to look there—because that was not where he'd left them.

I killed the fucker, didn't I? Not just disappeared him, but actually killed the little fucker.
It wasn't supposed to happen that way. His coordinates off by a mile, a month or two.
A baby, for Christ's sake.
He was talking to himself—his own voice inside his head. A sneering conscience-of-the-world voice nagging at him. Like something in a Frank Zappa song. Again, he could be mistaken—it could be all a dream, a hallucination. Wishful thinking.

He twirled the rod on the venetian blinds and dazzled himself with sunlight. The same as before: the view of scrub, a few palm trees off to the left. The sun hitting on everyone and everything. The cyan sea. Too much of a good thing, he thought then—all this too-good-to-be-true weather. Cartoon weather. Bananas, cranberry juice martinis—cyan, magenta, yellow. Was this new or did he always feel that way about the place? He couldn't tell—the fuzziness again, the double image. His brain seeing everything through a bad prescription, or someone else's glasses. No. A quadruple image, if you count the Tate variations complicating things.
This is the price you pay,
he told himself.
The memory karma thing. You break it, you pay for it.
Revising history meant he had to keep the old edition on the shelf as well.

He made his way down the stairs and out to the path
that led to the main building, to the dining room and cluster of common rooms that surrounded the pool. Anita, Jane,
Peter
—no Polythene Pam, thank God. Larry wearing a straw hat that was too small for him. But no Gordon. All of them sitting there laughing; smiling now at what Jane was saying, her hands doing things in the sunlight—bird things, Simon thought; her hands like wings. They were having breakfast, a late breakfast it looked like, what his mom used to call “brunch”—the last of it anyway; the guy clearing away the dishes looking up as Simon came over as if he were about to ruin his day by sitting down and ordering something.

The conversation died as he came closer; Peter Abbott turned in his chair to look at him. There was a disheveled quality about the guy today, his hair in need of a wash. His eyes seemed to be unfocused or locked on to something beyond the horizon—a hangover, maybe. Like what he was going through. A Pam hangover. He wondered what Peter Abbott saw in her. Skinny, spaced-out Pam. Something Manson wouldn't even bother with.

Simon dragged a chair over from another table—no one made an effort to make room for him, so he squeezed in between Larry and Anita. “So what's for breakfast?” He looked around in a fake theatrical way at their used plates. Bits of toast on one; Jane's with an omelet leaking runny cheese, her knife and fork together on the plate angled at five o'clock like the etiquette books say you're supposed to do—telling everyone she'd had enough.

“You missed it, man. You missed the boat,” Larry said, laughing his wide-open laugh (Simon hadn't missed it: he could see some of it now between Larry's war-torn teeth), laughing too long and too loud and looking around the table
as if he were being witty. As if the “boat” reference were actually funny.
Gravy boat maybe?
Simon gave up trying to make the connection.

“We were talking about Calliope's board of directors; the shareholders. What do you think? Should they call the shots? Or the stiffs down on the floor doing all the grunt work.” Anita's voice sometimes seemed to tell her what to say, the rough words coming out as if her racked throat were actually doing the thinking for her, picking words from a smoky gangster movie. The skin around her collarbones like something on a roasted chicken, Simon noticed then. A nice face, a not-bad body for a woman her age—but the skin . . .

Jane smiled and raised her eyebrows once in his
direction
—telegraphing the rules:
this is just a game and we want you to play along.

“Money talks,” he said, winking at Jane, telling her he could come up with rules of his own. Flirting with her. “We listen.”

“If the money's big enough, it screams and we just jump like a bunch of trained chimpanzees.” Anita was looking down at her coffee cup, not even caring to see if anyone was responding to what she said. She put her face in her hands and slowly raised her head through a yawn.

Peter Abbott stood up and almost fell down. He stumbled as if his legs had stopped working for an instant. He reached out for the back of Anita's chair and she turned in time to grab his arm but she knocked her coffee cup over in the process. A tongue of brown liquid crept across the white tablecloth.

“Jesus, Pete. Are you all right?”

“I'm fine, fine. Something I ate maybe—too much sun. I don't know.” Peter fell back into his chair and Larry leaned over and offered him his untouched glass of water. Jane was
on her feet next to him now; looking into his eyes; asking him if he felt faint; feeling his forehead, for God's sake.
Maybe that's the trick with Jane,
Simon thought. The Mother thing: she needed to mother.
Touch me, for Christ's sake. Touch
MY
fucking forehead, why don't you?

Peter Abbott sat there looking around as if he'd lost something; and for a moment Simon thought,
Oh shit, he knows
—paranoia creeping up on him.

But he couldn't know.
He'd snuffed Gordon as close to conception as he possibly could. Sure, he'd missed by a week or two—something in his own family history had deflected him from his target—but what difference would that really make? Gordon Quarendon was a nonentity now, a victim of crib death. He'd been barely alive, really. An abortion with a bad case of colic. Not really a complete person—a potential person, at best. Even the full-grown Gordon was barely a potential person for that matter.

Jane was still giving Peter Abbott all kinds of attention, her tight little butt rubbing against the table for a second, shifting things slightly—making Larry's glass of water shimmy for an instant. Blue shorts today. Bermudas. A snug white T-shirt embossed with the lines of her bra. Vanilla skin, chocolate mousse skin airbrushed by God, Simon thought. Perfect skin. He felt drool coming on, for God's sake. He turned away and watched Anita instead, and concentrated on the floral sack she was wearing today, how it defeated the prurient imagination. She got up then, as if she could feel the affront of what he was using her for, and walked over to the pool. She lit up and started smoking the cigarette like she was giving the fucking thing head.

Simon couldn't take it anymore. Watching Jane was torture,
watching Larry was torture at the other end of the spectrum. And watching Anita smoke made him think of Jane again. He got up, sent phony smiles all round, and headed for the lounge.

With Larry tagging along behind him, catching up. He was saying something about the session he'd done the day before: his breath like old socks this morning: old socks and garlic toast. Simon grabbed a cup of machine coffee and a mummified Danish that had never been close to Denmark, at the same time feigning interest in what Larry was saying—what the inside of a sunken German U-boat looked like after fifty years, how well the North Atlantic had treated these encapsulated Nazis.

Simon finally shucked off Larry and headed over to the reception area of the main building. It served as Calliope's interface with the outside world; it was where Eli's and Jane's offices were, and a big corner office reserved for the CEO who was never there.

It was a typical sort of business office: full of computers and filing cabinets; fax machines; the accounts department, where the paychecks came from. Down the hall from that, around the back, was a porch with a Coke machine and a few benches—the place where the menials reported for duty every morning. The janitorial staff; the guys that woke everyone up with their fucking leaf blowers.

He passed the receptionist—she smiled her recognition of him—and headed down a hallway through a few glass doors till he reached the small vestibule that served as a kind of psychological air lock between the administration area and the labs. It was like a waiting room in a dentist's office—plain Scandinavian couches, a coffee table piled with magazines,
travel posters on the wall telling everyone to come on down to St. Martin /Sint Maarten. Another wall was taken up by a large bulletin board. The cork surface had been gridded off with masking tape into two-dimensional pigeonholes; it served as a message center for the lab staff: the remote viewers and the technical support team. The names of the psi operatives took up the top row—laser-printed in block letters—six of them at last count. Alphabetically of course: Abbott, Gilford, Hayward, McEwan, Spalding . . . now only five.

No Quarendon. Gordon's space taken over by Anita's now—nothing where hers had been—a few hours ago? He remembered picking up his messages this morning (or had it been last night after dinner?), the latest pep letter from Jane; a hand-scrawled note from Blenheim. Stuff about his “lax attitude” toward post-session paperwork, or some shit like that.

Gordon/no Gordon. That simple: the perfect crime even if he had made a bit of a mess of it.
Get what you can from someone, then dispose of them.
Cruel, yes, but once he had perfected the process, there wouldn't be any suffering involved.
Sorry, Gord. You were my crash-test dummy.
All very clinical and civilized, really. Very Twenty-first Century. Very
Avengers,
when he thought about it. Retro but without the hokey sixties matte-black-painted cardboard props—all swooping sign-wave whistles and tiny flashing lights. Mrs. Peel would approve, he thought. John Steed would doff his bowler hat.

The gap, the overlay, the bifurcation of memory. One second a world with Gordon Quarendon, the next a world without. The dowsing lesson still there, though—the technique of dowsing a map, fresh enough to stick.

He knew how to dowse maps now, with his St. Christopher medal; and that would help him find the coordinates of what
ever he was aiming for. Spatial coordinates. He couldn't go anywhere without reference points.

He headed back out to the front of the building along the hall that took him past Jane's office. As he passed her door he could hear her voice, intermittent laughing—she was on the phone. His recollection of his lesson with Gordon had been somewhat diluted by a parallel memory from that day, he realized then. Clouded by a fuzzy gauze of a memory concerning Jane. It was lying on top of the original like a piece of tracing paper. Something incidental but telling—about what she thought of him. Something she had said about the scar on the top of his head, he remembered then. The look in her eyes when she asked him about it. The mothering thing again, the concern. It had been there for him too. At least, that's how he remembered it.