A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (24 page)

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stealing something from Pittsburgh

There was a vaguely biologically active feel to the place, the sense that all the cleaning solvents and disinfectants in the world would not be able to kill what was squatting on every surface of the room—the counters, the doorknobs, the carpet. Especially the carpet.

He'd been prepared for this, in a way—the letdown after the Good Life at Hotel Calliope. But he had to keep moving. Keep moving and not leave anything behind. He'd wake up in the middle of the night with a garden-variety paranoid vision
(there was nothing extrasensory perceptive about it; he could tell it was just run-of-the-mill anxiety working overtime) of Peter Abbott tracking him down and stealing something from his hotel room—one of his socks or a bit of dental floss out of the garbage. And another one of his sidekick, Pam, trolling the ether and latching on to where he was now—here in this bed, this hotel, this city.

What Simon hadn't anticipated were the changes showing up everywhere now—the little things that were starting to drive him crazy—stuff like how many teams there were in the National Hockey League, the name of the guy who won Best Supporting Actor in last year's Academy Awards, little things like that. The inconsequential stuff he had always taken for granted as being insignificant, but stable—there on the shelf of his common knowledge.

The taste of Heinz ketchup—the sweetness or the tartness of it wasn't how he remembered it. Or he remembered it in a new way and it was polluting the memory of how it used to taste. Heinz ketchup having always been a constant in his life—like the sound of his own voice. The other day he'd seen a woman in a restaurant squeezing it out of one of those little pouches you get in cafeterias and fast food places, squeezing it out drop by ruby drop, applying it to her French fry till she had a line of ketchup pearls strung along the length of it. Then she put the French fry in her mouth like it was the little wafer they hand out in church—as if she were celebrating a Mass of some kind. This is my body; take of my blood.

Simon's room was in a motel tagged on to a whole menu of motels and Inns—Super 8s and Best Westerns and Comfort Lodges; the glow of their signs like a cluster of giant bedroom
night-lights paid out along a frontage road beside I-70 just outside Kansas City. He'd chosen the blue-plate special—cheap, barely functional, one-of-a-kind: the Carousel Motel.

There was no carousel anywhere near the place as far as he could tell, except on the sign out front, and on the book of matches in the ashtray next to the TV remote that was anchored to the Formica nightstand. The logo was only a section of carousel: a galloping horse impaled on a fireman's pole, it looked like. The illuminated glass sign out by the road was broken and the shattered lower corner exposing the fluorescent tubes made the horse look as though it were leaping over a glowing fence—the fence at the edge of things. Nothing on the other side.

He pulled back the bedspread and stretched out; kicked off his shoes and tried to relax. He took out a set of foam earplugs he'd picked up at a Home Depot and put them in his ears. The sudden isolation made him want to get up and check the deadbolt on the door again, so he indulged himself and did just that, feeling the rug under his feet again, the filth-steeped rug screaming at him—stories he didn't need to be told; fumes of people's lives permeating the soles of his feet.

He glanced at the bedside table before lying down again—the cigarette burn on the edge of the Formica wood grain the size of a clitoris. Why that of all things came to mind, he did not know—the room like the sound box of a beat-up old guitar, he figured, resonant with fouling frequencies, melodies, snatches of conversations, screams, sighs—he didn't need to be privy to any of them. He craved the luxury of not remembering, not being able to make the connections—his search engine shut off for a few moments. He wondered if that was possible anymore.

He took a sip of water, turned off the lamp, put the plugs back in his ears, and tried again.
Relax, breathe deeply, slowly, think of Jane—what she taught you. No. Put
that
out of your mind.
He rested his hands on his chest, his fingers gently touching his medal—St. Christopher showing him the way (
Do not lead me astray
): carrying him on his shoulders.

Time to clean out the “In” basket. Next on his list: Anita Spalding. Born March 15, 1958. Pittsburgh. She had always seemed older than that to Simon—looked older; the cigarette thing, wrecking her skin. Well, she would never die of lung cancer—he would make sure of that. He fell back into himself, tumbling, orienteering his way through the ether; and he picked up a scrap of a song along the way: “Bye Bye Love.” Simon liked the Ben Vereen version better than the Everly Brothers original. The version from
All That Jazz.
The macabre edge to it. The Everly Brothers like little kids when they'd done their version, singing about puppy-fat love, crushed crushes.

He tacked through the ether searching for the Conception Zone—heading for roughly nine months earlier than Anita's birth date.

The way he would do it was to plunge into one day, then pull up and away into the ether; then fall into the next—then the next. A rolling, bouncing tumble down and then up and out again. Yo-yoing in and out of the matrix—he was getting good at it—a delicate brush with a time and a place for just as long as it took to reconnoiter, get his bearings, then pull out again.

Another day, then another—the zygote that one day would be Anita waiting for him, calling out to him.
Here I am; here I am.
As he moved further back, with each dip into the river,
the voice got fainter and fainter. Now further back—a day or two. A week. He felt like a salmon swimming upstream to the spawning ground.

Here we go . . .

Mr. and Mrs. Spalding playing house: a bedroom, a cramped messy place. The floor was on a slant; peeling wallpaper covered a low attic ceiling. Simon could hear the murmur of slow, connubial, workmanlike sex. A huge man in a swaying bed, the blankets and a comforter piled on top of him. The whole mess moving with him, a turtle shell of shifting bedding. If there was a woman under all that, Simon couldn't see her. He could hear her breathing, though, the moans—of pleasure, he assumed.

What to do—he hadn't thought beyond getting here—each conception unique in itself. He would wing it, play it by earplugged ear; draw back into the ether again, go back a few hours and see if he could change the course of things a bit earlier than this.

The man suddenly stopped moving; his wife said something: a questioning groan. The bed creaked as the man pulled away from the woman and rolled over; the bedclothes moved with him and the woman was left exposed for an instant. Skin and bones. Next to him she looked insignificant—chicken bones beside a mound of mashed potatoes.

The man moved out into the hall and turned on the bathroom light—he was naked; his gut like another creature clinging to the front of him. Another turtle. He was looking for something in the medicine cabinet over the sink. Simon floated up through the ceiling into the attic and down again, headfirst to get a closer look:
Shit, he's getting a condom—
Jesus
. . .
The fat guy was tearing it open with his teeth, fumbling now, peering over his huge belly.

The wrong night. Or maybe the woman was already pregnant and they didn't know it yet. They had been right into it and all of a sudden the guy figures he should take
precautions
—weird. Simon couldn't figure it out.

Then he did something Simon had never seen before—heard about, yes: cock rings and all that: sex shop stuff—but never actually tried himself. The guy stretched out the condom as if he were a clown ready to make an animal out of a balloon and tied it round the base of his dick, like a tourniquet. Playing with himself now, pumping himself up.
Shit,
Simon thought.
Like an accident in the Holland Tunnel—sperm gridlock. How the hell was he going to compete with that?
This couldn't be the right night.

Back in the bedroom now: the man was climbing into bed, the springs making a plea for the poor wife as he buried her under a mass of flesh and bedclothes again. The same old drill, but with a new bit. A few minutes of something out of Steve Reich or Stockhausen: metal abrading metal; the sedulous rhythmic resolve of climbing stairs or chopping wood. Work without a payday.

Anita deserves better than this,
Simon thought. Larry's conception had a modicum of Jimmy Stewart/Frank Capra schmaltz to it, at least.

Up and out of there. Back a night or two—to the bedroom again. Both of them asleep this time, the clock on the side table ticking, the hands glaring at him—radium green: a quarter past three. Anita's essence like a glowworm peeping the periphery.

Something was drastically wrong. He had presumed; he had taken the data at face value.
Stop analyzing,
he told himself.
Just focus on your target and go with the flow.
Into the ether again, letting himself drift.

. . . falling into bright sunlight outside an ice cream stand, a lunch counter—the sound of children squealing, shrieks and splashes, the familiar scent of chlorine.
Jesus, I can't get away from it . . .
Anita's mother looking into her handbag and taking out a change purse, poking at it with two fingers, her pinky like a dorsal fin, she was digging so deeply. Giving the young guy behind the counter the money—a boy about eighteen years old, wearing a little white cadet hat and apron; the apron smeared with chocolate syrup, cherry. He handed her an ice cream cone wrapped in a paper napkin—two scoops: one chocolate, the other vanilla.

She stood there eating her cone, not moving away from the shade of the awning, and watched him as he tossed the ice cream scoop into a square stainless steel bowl. The young guy was leaning toward her over the counter now, smiling, jerking his head back and forth with the exuberance of his words, getting her to laugh right in the middle of a bite; it made her back away for a second as her hand came to her mouth in recovery. The quick laughter was a sign to him:
You have plucked my heartstrings.
He gave her a fresh napkin and she dabbed at a spot on her blouse just over her left breast.

A little kid came running up to the counter and asked for something. The cold air from the cooler was visible as the young guy took out a Good Humor bar and an orange popsicle. He smiled at the woman through it all, looking down at her legs for a second, gauging.

Anita's mom hung around to finish her ice cream and the
young man behind the counter went about his business, playing at being busy: shaking the French fryer, poking at the glistening hot dogs spinning on their chrome rollers. Chlorine and cooking fat in the air, in his clothes—a radio somewhere: Pat Boone singing “Love Letters in the Sand.” Kids squealing. A young mom telling her babies it was time to go.

They were in darkness now, the warm transparent darkness of urban summer. Anita's mother and the young man from the poolside lunch counter had reached the limit of their need to drive away from it all and were now parked at a spot at the end of a cinder-strewn road famous for its coded excuse for being a great place to view the city—the lights of Pittsburgh; the confluence of three rivers spangled with urban incandescence. A place to display one's civic pride.

Grape soda. Simon could smell it along with the lingering vapors of sun-warmed upholstery. There was a hint of recent cigarettes and the basso scent of deep fryer fat. As Simon came down on the scene—a somersault as his head dipped into the pool of sheet metal and fabric (the car roof metal, a plane of itch CAT-scanning his brain) he sensed that he had at last reached the source of the Anita River.

The crickets were a high-end tintinnabulation, a background to the car radio lulling the couple into isolation. The dashboard lights made her thin legs showgirl pretty, Tinseltown smooth, Rockette erotic. The driver's ice cream–chapped hand had just found Times Square. The Great White Way. His breathing hers now; hers his—conspiring.

The cardboard pill box hat and apron were gone, the same for her blouse—flung into the backseat along with her purse. The chocolate ice cream stain had dried to a shadow of a sunspot on the tessellated pattern of pale pink hearts. The young
man passed her a bottle of Southern Comfort and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he sat up and straightened his long body for a second as if he were getting ready to participate in something formal, athletic—the long jump.

This is it,
Simon thought.
Ground zero.
He knew it for sure.
This night, this place, this man.
Turtle-Belly wasn't Anita's daddy after all.

He pulled up and away and then dove down into the scrub of trees that surrounded the rough cindered ground of the makeshift parking lot.

It was time for the Annunciation, the Incarnation.

He spun on the axis of his hips till he righted himself and brought his feet around to touch the ground. As he willed himself into being, he felt the now familiar heft of his own body falling into the remote ethereal shell of himself that had brought him here. Solid now, corporeal, integrated, in one swift moment of transition. Painless, like slipping on heavy boots.

Simon could see the car more clearly now: a two-tone '55 Dodge, it looked like. Fledgling fins sprouted from the taillights.

He would just walk over there and introduce himself, as Roger Ebert, say, or Brad Pitt—say his car had broken down or something . . .

He took two steps around a small tree and it was like walking into a gale force wind.

Simon felt a wave of vertigo twist his head around; it was as if an invisible set of arms had applied a half nelson. He fell back into pine needles and weeds and looked up to see the stars and the lights of the city blur and shimmy for an instant, the gibbous moon he only just now realized was rising off to
his left seemed to flicker and dart around the sky till it locked into position over the black outline of a spruce tree farther down the hill.