A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (27 page)

He sighed and turned his head away from her as if he were looking for someone to back him up on how unreasonable she was; then he leaned back and took out his cigarettes. The shirt fabric over his midsection looked freshly ironed for a
second. “Can we eat now?” He glanced down at the menu, then out across the room looking for the waitress.

“Sure you can ‘eat' now. Here, have some sugar. How about some goddam ketchup? What's your problem—”

“I mean ‘order' now, okay? Smart-ass.” He opened the menu and squinted, his mouth silently working through the list of entrees, tasting them word by word.

“I want that table and chairs because it matches the hutch that was my grandmother's, okay? How many times do I have to tell you.”

Connie Wright and Dave Gilford had known each other since the sixth grade—if being aware of each other's existence could be considered a form of acquaintance. It was only recently that they had become friends—but right from the start there was a married-couple familiarity in the way they
interacted
—as if being in the same community, living a few blocks apart, had mated them in some way, put them on the same wavelength.

It had nothing to do with love; or even companionship. They had skipped all of that, leapfrogged the preliminaries, and waded right into the weedy river of commitment—that desperate state of mutually assured distress that to a later generation would become known as co-dependency. Connie told her mother she had a sixth sense about it—and that was why she put up with the crap he dropped in her lap every so often. She was positive they were meant to be together.

Simon could see all this—the big picture; the perpendicular perspective—from his ethereal perch in the quantum state of RV displacement—but the information was coming from somewhere beyond its point of origin—there was an echo of it hitting his inner ear long before the initial signal broke
through the noise—as if someone else were drawing the information out of him and feeding it back.

Pam was already here, in a way—he sensed that, but it couldn't be—she wasn't even conceived of yet but here she was, her personality saturating the place.
A deflection of data, that's all—get on with it,
he told himself.

That song by the Beatles, “Polythene Pam,” started running through his head.

Just get on with it.

“You're too fat, Dave. Look at you. Your gut's hanging out—roll over . . .”

“Love handles, baby. Love handles . . .”

“You're breathing like a freight train and I haven't even—that's it. Oh yes.
Shit
that feels good.”

He started to sing through the wheeze of his labored breathing: “Oh baby, just a little bit—oh Jesus—” He coughed and held his breath; he went very still for a moment and then there was a long, rippling shudder Connie could feel run right through him; right through her.
God. That was quick,
she thought.
Just got it up and he's coming already. Not like Dave at all. Not after a couple of drinks . . .

Simon didn't bother with a full-blown materialization, this time. He opted for something he hadn't tried before. What the hell . . . more like a partial materialization, really. Just for a moment; a half second. He was taking a sort of hit-and-run approach.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold . . .
His thumb and forefinger. A pinch hit-and-run. He had studied his
Gray's Anatomy
and had a pretty good idea about what he should be aiming for—the conceptual coordi
nates, if not the actual physical ones—the coronary artery, the one that fed the muscles of the heart. (This is the exhibit we all pause to reflect upon—we sometimes press our faces right up against the display case—when we visit the Hypochondriac's Chamber of Horrors; the one where you can actually see the flow of blood dwindle to a syrupy, platelet-rich, congealing, pink trickle.)

Connie didn't so much as scream when she climbed off him. It was more like a long keening wail. Something from a Greek tragedy. She was thumping at Dave's chest when Simon pulled back up into the ether—and it surprised him for a second how far he'd come, how removed he could be from it all—two in one blow; that was a first for him. He had actually gone out of his way to murder someone this time.

Pam undone before she was born and this poor sucker taken out in the prime of his day, if not the prime of his life. A double play.

And the funny thing was, Simon really didn't give a shit.

.
.
.
lest we forget

Peter held on to her all through what he hoped was sleep. A semblance of Pam broke through the darkness (the smell and feel of her there beside him in bed; the flannel pajamas she liked to wear sometimes—as clear in his mind as anything could be) and jolted him back into the cold white glow of what he had lost. It left a flashbulb burn mark on his soul that was both a vacancy and an irritating distraction at the same time. She had never been part of his life and now she was the all-consuming object of it; she had been the focus of every waking moment and now she was gone.
His consciousness suddenly a two-sided coin; Janus facing both ways.

All the next day he kept seeing her at different times in his life: when he was twenty-two wanting to be the next James Dean and she was seventeen; where she would have been when he was thirteen years old: he had desperately wanted a suit like the one John Travolta wore in
Saturday Night Fever;
he had believed that the ability to twirl on the dance floor wearing a tight white suit was exactly what was needed to win the heart of that one special girl in his eighth-grade class. Pam would have been an eight-year-old kid growing up in Minneapolis. A citizen of his world, if not part of it.

There was a cold fog hanging in the air outside his window. It looked out on a patch of lawn that fell off steeply toward a thicket of overgrown bushes. Passmore College—the name of the place was like the rider on the horse of what he saw out the window. He knew it the way he knew his name, his phone number; the extension number to his small suite of rooms, here in what used to be the dormitory. It was all part of another life, a new strand in the thickening rope of his memories. Sixty-four versions of them now—two to the power of the five disappearances. Ron, Gordon, Larry, Anita, Pam. The pruning of each one from the world had reconstructed the branch itself, not just eliminated the twig.

After a few days, Pam gathered in his consciousness like a recurring dream. The vision of her impinging on this barren one, not so barren really—Jenny, the woman he saw occasionally, the new part of him like the dream part overlapping, interfering, his head swimming for an instant, vertiginous, rattling the underpinnings of who he was. That was familiar at least, the disorientation.

Pam's gone
—struck him every so often like the blow of a heavy, soft pillow; but at the same time, the shock of it was absorbed by the parallel conviction that she had never been part of his life—which made him feel all the more guilty for being the one left behind. And if this loss was anything like all the others, he knew that she had never been part of anyone's life.

Peter turned on the TV just in time to see the anchorman ending the news. He was wrapping up the latest report on the collapse of East Germany. The New Millennium. How it all fit with the predictions of Nostradamus and Revelation. All old hat to Peter; it had a
déjà vu
familiarity about it. A filament of an event from one of the strands of alternate memories. As the anchor signed off, he raised his hand in an odd salute that again seemed right from the perspective of this new edition of things. Or was it an old tradition in Cedar Rapids, and something consistent through the turns his life had taken, and now that everything was suspect even this quirk of behavior seemed alien and makeshift.

There was one constant in all this—Simon. Simon behind it all. No doubt about it now—he felt it deep inside of himself.
I'm the only one left. Why? Why is he saving me till last? What does he want from me?

The phone rang. It was Jenny; she leapfrogged the pleasantries and waded into an account of the session she had just come out of—with Rick her tech “familiar.”

“He had me actually down there with the grunts—at ground zero. The front line people. Right in the middle of it all. Jesus, it was—it was like I don't know, really tense. These guys were—”

He found himself drifting off; making sounds in the appropriate places but not really listening. The memories again,
swinging his attention away from the conversation. “I don't think they were just, you know, checking out how fast I could get into OBE mode—” Jenny was saying, just as he got a flash of Pam with him on the beach looking over her shoulder raising her feet behind her one after the other to take off her sandals. Her hand coming up to his cheek; the scent of orange on her fingers, the fingernails chewed back to nothing.

It was Veterans Day, Armistice Day, Remembrance Day too, to some people. All about the war dead of the Great War, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery on the TV for a moment or two of the evening news. The snow was coming down through the fitful patches of sunlight like petals from a blossoming tree high above the panicked clouds.

He was led into a lab he had never seen before and made to lie down on a half-filled waterbed. The temperature of the water was set to ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit, the technician said. The young guy's white coat was too long for him; the hem of it looked frayed and mud-speckled, as if he'd inherited it from someone even shorter.

In darkness now, with his psychometric link in his hands—a pair of shoes—the headphones full of the incessant susurration of the sea. St. Martin in his head, the white sand and the blue sky: a flag of memories wrapping around him. Pam lay on her stomach reading with a finger in her mouth, her long hair pushed behind sunglasses; the blue bathing suit she had bought that time in Philipsburg cupped her
buttocks
—“What's up, Pete?” (The harsh brown buzz of the technician's voice broke through the white noise.) “You're nowhere near alpha. Something on your mind?”

“No, no. Give me, give me another few minutes.”

Pam was with him now all the time—it was an obsession; he felt comfortable calling it that. He was preoccupied with the need to dwell on the parallel line of his life he had spent with her. It all seemed real, as real as anything could be, as any memory could be. But fiction, all of it, he kept telling himself. A relic, a dream, a framed and matted portrait of something outside of who he was now.

On a long weekend he took a trip to Minneapolis and looked her up. The phone book wasn't much help—forty Gilfords were listed and the few P. Gilfords he called were all Peters. He remembered her telling him about the neighborhood she grew up in: Edena, and he took a taxi out there and walked the streets for an hour or so—as if that would help. Neat postwar frame bungalows amid thickets and boulevards of mature oak and maple. He imagined her glancing down at the humps in the sidewalk where the roots had outgrown their plot of narrow turf next to the curb, her eyes imprinted with the pattern of broken concrete. Here where he was standing, next to the red-brick school with its chain-link fence. He touched it and he imagined he could feel her small fingers (he couldn't bring himself to believe she had actually been there:
It's all in your head,
he told himself.
Delusion; a psychometric mirage
)—the delicate web of skin between them—clinging. Stubby, gnawed ends poking through the hexes of it. Hanging on.

He didn't know her father's first name or her mother's maiden name so he was left with nothing but the physical need to chase her down, with his legs and his extra sense of smell; the psychic bloodhound in him came up short in the
end—not a whiff. She was never there; she had never been anywhere.

All in your head,
he had to tell himself again. That was all that was left of her. Simon had made sure of that; and he was the only other one who could corroborate his story. Is one version of the narrative enough? He knew that for sure now—Simon Hayward was behind it all.

He wondered if he could go back to the early days of Calliope in St. Martin, but in this time line Calliope had never ever been there. The forking path of the organization had somehow taken a different turn before Peter had been drawn into the picture. All the changes in the flow of things—Simon's handiwork; his deletions and adjustments—had steered Calliope itself in a different direction. Eli Thornquist had never been part of Calliope—nor Jane Franklin. That part of some of the strands of his memory had been completely eradicated from this latest version of things. He could only remote view the past of the world he was in now—and he could only view the common past of all of the missing Calliope people further upstream, before it all got polluted with Simon's shit-
disturbing
.
How far back would that be? Back before Larry was born—conceived of. Back in the early forties.

On impulse he had called a friend in Pittsburgh, a stagehand he'd met in a production of
Man of La Mancha
back in the eighties, and asked him to check out Anita Spalding. He said he had a relative in the private investigation business, a Gerry Sanchez who worked out of Philadelphia; and after a few moments Peter finally came round to saying yes, he would be willing to pay to “get the job done right.”

Two weeks later he got an invoice and a letter from Sanchez
saying there were no records for an Anita Spalding who had been born in Pittsburgh in the late fifties. The closest match was an “Anne Spalding” who had died last year at the age of ninety.

He had even less to go on as far as Larry McEwan was
concerned
—all Peter could remember was something about him growing up near Buffalo, New York. Gordon Quarendon, of course, was a different story. Gordon had kept nothing to himself and Peter knew for sure when and where he had been born.

A week later he got a call from Sanchez saying he had found a Gordon Quarendon born on the day in question, November 2, 1956. He had come up with a birth certificate but also a death certificate for the same party dated about seven weeks later. “Crib death,” he said, “as far as I can make out.” The mention of crib death triggered something that chimed like a bell on the deck of a shipwreck far below the surface of Peter's consciousness—a distant memory of a dream, or a conversation about a dream. “The kid stopped breathing in the middle of the night. That's what the medical examiner's office report says anyway. Natural causes.”

“You seem distracted—down in the dumps.” Jenny was making coffee in the kitchen. Her voice carried over the clatter of sliding drawers and running water. She did this all the time—asked him important questions with her back to him. As if the eye contact would distort the message in some way. But she was a psychic like himself, gifted in the way that made it hard sometimes for him to let down the drawbridge. “You used to be a pretty happy person; now you're moody all the time,” she said as she came into the room with a tray—cups, the
sugar and cream, a plate of oatmeal cookies, napkins: the little things, the protocols meant something to Jenny, the thank-yous and the you're-welcomes. She finally looked at him and, seeing no answer coming, raised her chin and smiled—the kind of smile that converts a query into a mere observation.

She had the body of an athlete and it allowed her to fold her legs under her on the couch and still hold on to the tray. She was wearing track pants and a thin T-shirt. She waited for him to clear the books and papers from the coffee table before putting it down. Jenny was lithe and plump all at once; her young, supple body like new foam rubber in some places, wicker furniture in others. She could make her toes move each one by itself—something he had never been able to do.

“It's the weather, I guess, the time of the year,” he finally said when she was settled on the coach.

“Maybe you need a vacation; somewhere warm, the
Caribbean
—how about that? You and me?” His mind leaking out even here. Nothing sacred. Pam like an open book if he kept this up.
I could tell her about Pam and see what happens,
he thought. Confession as a lightning rod, the electrons of his misery shunted to earth, the power station of his angst decommissioned by the simple act of saying the words: Pam. Love. Gone. Crazy about her. Literally.

He could see clearly now how one woman could eclipse the other—how if Pam walked into the room right now Jenny would fade to penumbral obscurity. Such is the power of love and obsession. But here he was in this real world with a woman whose presence had a heritage of textures and smells and liquid confluences that were undeniably his. The palpable moistness of contiguous play he could depend on. This was as real as anything could be—life in the here and now,
with a woman who at times seemed like a stranger to him or, at best, an old girlfriend whose nuanced habits were like the lines of a role in a play he had done years before.

And sometimes Pam broke through as just a vague
after
image
; a footprint, a concavity where this new life—this other life with Jenny—was convex, robust. He knew that if he could leave it alone it would fade eventually—memory was like the banks of a river, the flow of time smoothed out the rough edges as it dropped things off and picked things up along the way. But he didn't want to let it go. Letting it go would damn her to total oblivion. He was all she had left.

After the coffee they went for a walk across campus. The snow had stopped falling but the wind was keeping it from melting. It gathered in patches around the mounds of raked leaves and in the lee of the stone steps. They ended up at the site of the new addition that was being tacked on to what used to be the dining hall. It was a bold statement in concrete and glass (it looked to Peter like the front of a Rolls-Royce) that said nothing about what would be going on inside; what had gone on before in the buildings that surrounded it. An orange plastic fence blocked the way to the front entrance. Beyond it Peter could see a Dumpster piled with construction debris; it looked like a barge run aground on a barren, pockmarked moonscape. The icing-sugar of new snow made the peaks and troughs of the disturbed ground into whitecaps.

“Can we get inside yet?” Peter said into his turned-up collar. He could see light coming from halfway up the facade of glass.