A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (19 page)

What wine do you serve with little bits of skin?

Just like turning on a flashlight with dead batteries—an instant of white health fading to amber, then nothing. The next day Peter awoke from a turmoiled sleep with a flash of clarity that quickly dimmed to muddled panic. In that lucid moment he knew he wasn't responsible; it wasn't all in his head—he wasn't crazy. Gordon Quarendon had once been—and now he wasn't.

Pam was still asleep. She sighed and rolled away from him. In the waxing dawn light he could see where her shoulder was imprinted with creases: the intaglio of fabric leaving its
mark—next to a scar on her upper arm he hadn't noticed before. Maybe it hadn't even been there to notice till now and the world out there had changed in a myriad of ways he would never be able to delineate. Pam with the scar; Pam without. He wanted to wake her up and quiz her on all she'd ever told him about herself. He moved closer and kissed the back of her neck—white skin where the hair was parted. The musky scent of her, the continuo beneath the melody of her shampoo.

Gordon was gone from the earth, had never walked the wrinkled face of it; he knew that for a fact somehow. A hole in the universe that had once been Gordon Quarendon. Even the hole had been swallowed up, healed over. All that was left of him was in Peter's head:
his
memories and his alone, no one else's. His mind glanced off a passing notion (it was like a stone rising from the flow of a stream) that that wasn't the case. Gordon's existence was mirrored in someone else's memory too. And then it was gone—the tracks and traces of it lost in the blizzard of wakefulness.

Why me?
he thought then. Like the only survivor of a plane crash. Just the way he seemed to be the only one who still clearly remembered Ron Koch.

He could accept it, to some degree—this curse of
remembering
—as one of his special gifts that he must carry like schoolbooks—his homework—for the rest of his life. But what made him question his mind's authority was the layer upon layer of parallel memories. Gordon without Ron, Ron without Gordon. The clutter of chance encounters in the
day-to-day
percolation of people at Calliope, all reconfigured, rechoreographed with neither of them around, both of them around. One of them around. The other one around.

The day before, when Gordon had disappeared from the
breakfast table, Peter had kept his mouth shut. Gordon there one moment, gone the next. The rough-cut splice of one reality slapping up against the other. The shift had left his heart swaying, his torso like an unevenly loaded washing machine. He'd spent the rest of the morning in a jet lag of sorts, his head awash in a deluge of conflicted memories—the world had shifted under his feet, under his soul.

He'd gone back to his room and phoned Pam. She was still in bed, she said; but that was okay: “I should be up anyway. Give me twenty minutes.” They went for a walk along the road and down the path through spiky scrub and struggling beach grape to the ocean. To the insistent breeze and the rhythmic pulse of waves scrolling up the beach.

“It wasn't like what happened to Ron Koch—it couldn't have been. Gordon was sitting right there in front of me. Something else or someone else did it to him.”

She looked at him and he could see she was trying very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. She was eating an orange; she kept the peel folded into her hand, not wanting to let it go, taking each segment like medicine, it seemed to Peter. Along with his words. She hated breakfast, she nibbled and fueled her way through the day till suppertime, scuttling her blood sugar with binges of potato chips and chocolate bars.

She was there listening to him at least, and that made it all right to some degree—even if it was all in his head. Something to build on; it came to mind how important that was—a constant. Consistency had never been very important to him till now. The ritual of doing a show every night was the closest he'd ever come to it. The repetition of lines, gestures and cues, the routines of backstage business and politics—he had
always taken it all for granted. Now he craved it, yearned for it, like the playback loop of wave-hitting-beach, wave-hitting-beach—the varied sameness, like breathing.

“Maybe this Gordon guy imploded because of something he was
going
to do—in the future. Isn't that what happened to Ron? I mean, if you were with Ron, say, back in nineteen seventy whatever, when he supposedly died, it wouldn't look like he had anything to do with it either, right?” They had crossed the Sahara of sunstroked sand to the band of darker, cooler stuff at the water's edge. Peter watched as Pam took off her sandals, looking over her shoulder and lifting her feet up behind her one after the other. She carried the shoes now with her middle finger hooked through the heel loops.

“Why me, though? Why am I the only person who remembers him?” He reached out and put his hand gently against the middle of her back—spread across the soft pages of flesh on either side of the spine. The touch was like a warm bath washing through the center of him—and the immediate sense that she was enjoying it too. One of the rewards of their psychic abilities. It scared him to think what it would be like if it ever turned around. The prospect of knowing without a doubt when someone stopped caring for you.

“You know who I'm talking about, right?” Peter called out over the rush of the sea. “Gordon Quarendon. The motormouth dowser. Tall guy with a ponytail. Do you remember anything at all?”

“I don't know, it could be you talking about him and I'm picking up on your memories; sort of vague impressions, more like someone you've never met before showing up in a dream.” She was teasing the bubbled edge of an advancing
wave with her bare feet, the wash of it like a spilled bucket of soap suds. “You know. The sense of him without the big picture.”

“Maybe he never existed and it's all in my head and now I've planted a seed of it in your head.” He kicked at the water. “Shit. It's so fucking frustrating.”

“We could check it out like they did with Ron Koch. See if he ever did exist somewhere.”

Peter thought of Anita then, the humiliation of being compelled to make what seemed like unreasonable demands—the stance of the uncool. The protestations, the squawkings of the deluded. He suddenly felt closer to what she must have gone through when Ron had disappeared.

They had reached the craggy rock face at the end of the beach; there was shade here and they sat down on an outcropping and just watched and listened for a few minutes. The water and shore having an argument. Pam reached over and took his hand in both of hers. A plane took off from the airport. They watched it rise from the line of distant palms and rooftops like a miracle, a conjuror's illusion.

“I believe you,” she said then, reaching up to his cheek and gently turning his head, making him look at her. He kissed her on the forehead—tasting salt, feeling grit on his tongue—and then on the lips. The messages, the pictures, coming freely, unfettered. It scared him that it could be this good; and he sensed a fear in Pam too. A flash of something with stark, absolute boundaries—a void, a black fissure of numbing cold oblivion. Opening up, never closing.

Her hand let go of his and ended up at her mouth—he could hear it: the click of her teeth shearing off a sliver of fingernail.

When Peter called that morning she had been watching a documentary about allergies and dust mites (she was still in bed watching television—clearing her head from the residual rant of dreams—nothing concrete: it was all mush by the time she opened her eyes, like a watercolor painting left out in the rain—smeared into a muddy nothing). The show was about tiny spider things that hang out in pillows and couch cushions and live off human skin. The thousands of tiny fragments of skin people shed constantly. It was their main source of food—only source of food. Dead skin. Pam figured the expert on the tube was probably one of those kids she remembered from school who got their jollies from grossing out the girls with live worms or dead flies. He was smiling now and saying “It's fortunate for us they don't like raw, fresh, uncooked skin.”

She turned off the TV and a word came into her head:
Necrophage.
Then the man from the TV program's voice saying “consumers of death.” That happened sometimes. The soundtrack of the show would be playing through her head as if her mind were still tuned in to the station. Words she would not normally use, never mind know the meaning of, would come out of nowhere. Pam was suspicious of words, the power of them; the people who used them like a loaded gun.

Chowing down on the dead.
We all do that,
she thought. Eating was killing; but
not
eating was death. The puzzle of it made her yawn.
And nail-biting—eating yourself. What was that all about?

It's their shit we're allergic to, supposedly—the protein in the shit, fifteen different types of it. Dust mite shit under our
noses all night long.
Thanks for that little tidbit of information,
she thought to herself.
That'll help me sleep tonight.
She remembered one of her mother's favorite expressions: “Don't shit where you eat,” and she wondered whether there was a wise old dust mite out there somewhere in Dead Skin City who tried to tell all the other dust mites something like that. Whether they did in fact eat in one place and shit somewhere else. Sort of a dust mite code of behavior regarding which part of the couch cushion or pillow to shit in and which part was reserved for dining on all those bits of skin. She doubted it somehow. People, so-called intelligent beings, didn't even follow this basic rule—she thought of the tradition in some countries of eating only with the right hand, and using the other one to wipe yourself, supposedly. The left being the shit-wiping hand, which was kind of a piss-off for people like Peter who were left-handed.

Don't shit where you eat.
Maybe having a relationship with Peter was something like that—mixing business with your personal life. So what.
If this is eating shit, then fine. I'll have to deal with the consequences.

Coprophage
came into her mind then—the word “coprophage.” Someone or something that eats shit. The TV show again, maybe. She was still tuned in to the program.

She crossed the room feeling dust mites between her toes all of a sudden, nibbling at her calluses—once you know something you can never ever
not
know it, her history teacher in high school had said one day, and now that she knew that, it occurred to her in an elliptical way that she would never be able to
not
know that once you were told something new you would never be able to
not
know it . . .
Dust mites everywhere
I look now—for the rest of my life. A room never being completely clean ever again.

She picked up the remote (she had this habit of leaving the remote on top of the TV for some reason) and turned the TV back on. On impulse, she changed the station—to a show about a man who couldn't figure out why his wife had left him—a talk show, one of those nondescript Oprah
knockoffs
—“. . . just because I drink my own urine,” he said. The medicinal benefits spelled out in a book he'd read. No harm to anyone, especially his wife, he said, only to himself. In the privacy of his own home.

“The kitchen or the bathroom?” That's what the Oprah clone lady said she'd like to know, frowning and smirking at the same time, waggling her big dildo microphone, playing up to the self-righteous bearbaiting whoops and groans of the studio audience.

Don't shit where you eat.

That was going to be the clincher after the next commercial break; Pam knew it for a fact. She turned off the set and put on some more clothes—different clothes: the cleanest clothes she could find. She took an orange out of the fridge because she needed something in her stomach and it was the only thing she could think of putting into her body right then that wouldn't make her retch.
Knowledge is a good thing
, she told herself. You are what you know. You are what you eat.
I am an info-phage.
An info-phage, a nymphophage.

Sometimes it would be nice to just shut everything out, she thought. Take a pill that would shut down her so-called gift. Booze did it but only for an hour or so; the side effects weren't worth it. Maybe a pill to take away part of your memory for
a day or two. A week. A sort of what-you-don't-know-won't-hurt-you pill. A mind vacation from all the shit.

Hearing the sudden sound of the phone was like falling through river ice. The knowledge that it was Peter like a clean, warm, bubble bath.

.
.
.
the day Aldous Huxley took his last trip

Shadow puppets in the trees—that's how Simon saw them: everyone now. Even himself. Blotches of silver oxide on emulsified paper.
That's all I am to these people—the theorists,
Simon thought. Paranoia turned into a career. Conspiracy. The breathing together. Men who breathe together speak the same language—that's what it came down to. Companions: people who share bread. All these words no one ever took the trouble to decipher anymore. Words evicted from the family home. Rootless. No fixed address.

Simon as a patch of underexposed black-and-white film.

Dallas—November 22, 1963.

He was practicing his craft, his new vocation: corporeal manifestation in the past—and in this instance fucking with Peter Abbott's astral head. He'd heard from Larry that Peter had done an “11-22” already. That was the code name for the target—the day Kennedy was assassinated back in 1963. It was the nickname for the client as well—this rich old bugger who couldn't get enough of this stuff. This was one of Peter's sessions he hadn't noticed that day he'd remote viewed the lab and found the target list in Peter's file.

But it was out of curiosity more than anything else. Like all those people who had made the pilgrimage to Kensington Palace to watch Lady Di's flowers wilt in the sun.

Simon was playing at being the mysterious figure silhouetted against the dapple of tree shadow on the grassy knoll.
THE
grassy knoll. The only grassy knoll left now. “Grassy” and “knoll” could never be conjoined in innocence again. Tristan and Isolde; Abbott and Costello. Juliet and the other one. Living in sin; the sin of knowledge, of being known.

Like the word “Madonna”—the name itself hijacked the etymology. Deflowered it. A grunge band he once hung out with in Vancouver used the name Grassy Knoll Coward for a while. That was something else, though: a knee-jerk allusion turned into a kind of poetry. A verbal Escher.

Simon had a theory about Madonna, not really a conspiracy theory, not unless you were really paranoid. More a thesis than a theory. The sound of her name was really a subconscious simulacrum of baby talk—a Piaget pidgin English version of the word “McDonald's.”

It was all there if you looked for it. Her breasts in the “Blonde Ambition” tour, the gold-lamé bullet-nosed bra—a
Jungian recapitulation of the infant response to the Golden Arches. Women's breasts viewed from a toddler's perspective, from below, looked a lot like the golden arches. The double N's blurred and slurred into the double M's of the word “MoM” elided into an overlapping vowel-less MM.

“MMMMM.” Things that make you go “MMMMM.” With your mouth around a teat there's no room for vowels: “I
want to go to Ma'donna'.”
Kids weaned on the stuff, sucking back chocolate shakes: “I
want to go to Ma'donna'.”
Imprinted with her name way before puberty—all that mouth/Mom pleasure setting them up for a major pop fixation. Oral/aural—all the same really—pop music ultimately about what goes in the mouth. What comes out of the mouth, out of the body—then into someone else's body.

Back in the tree-dappled shadows again. Dealey Plaza, Dallas; the overpass with the picket fence. Simon back in the trees out of the sun, watching it all unfold—the JFK thing. Best seat in the house; knowing Peter was here too doing an RV session, flapping in the ether like a dead leaf. Simon wondered how naive this crowd really was—how many other temporal tourists were here for the hot-ticket item of the sixties: JFK's farewell tour.

Simon's mind kept going astray, here of all places—unable to focus on the best show in town. He could always do a replay of course, pull back up and out into the ether, back into his real-time body and charge his batteries for a few days, come back later. But shit, he was here now, his body solid, stable, obviously none of his relatives had anything to do with all this—which was kind of surprising given the politics of the nut-case uncles on his mother's side.

Here we go . . . He could hear the motorcycle engines off
in the distance, the faint applause from the crowds further up Main Street, up near Houston Street, he figured, where the route took them snuggling up to the base of the Texas School Book Depository.

He pulled up a piece of grass and looked at it, the banality of it, commonplace blades of grass—grassy knoll grass. Like some Walt Whitman poem—cosmic in its humility. He brought it to his nose and sniffed: half-dead with a rotting hay smell—the banality of evil, the sense that this place and time were pivotal to the flow of things only in retrospect. The moment a simple transaction of colliding subatomic particles like any other few minutes in the course of things—all transformed into the heft of history by attention.

He watched the motorcade make the final turn, the heat shivering over the pavement, the sunlight a silent solar wind pummeling a thousand eyes—the popping echo of gunshots making the crowd wonder what to do—some of them reacting the way they had learned to react—a man pulling his small son to the ground and shielding him with his flesh, his own sack of blood. Others looking for guidance, a word from above. The go-ahead to weep.

The President there all of a sudden as if he'd made his entrance a few beats too soon. Hunched over like someone in prayer needing a moment to himself—a person dying in his wife's arms. Then a plume of wine-red mist. The God turned into flesh.

Simon got up and ran with the others, acting the way he should—randomly, in confusion, resisting the urge to wave as the motorcade sped away under the overpass.