A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (31 page)

A woman came by; she worked her way along the row of seated men touching each shoulder in turn till she reached Peter and the man with the bloodshot eyes. His top hat was gone now and his thinning hair showed patches of scale on his scalp. She sat on his knee with a pronounced self-
consciousness
that prompted all around them to pay lewd attention. But she immediately asked to be introduced to Peter and in his stupor—later he put it down to the languid wash of the hot room and the alcohol, the sluggish performance of his ersatz body—he unthinkingly reached out and took her hand.

She was a tall, slender woman of about twenty. Her plain, high-necked dress was unbuttoned to reveal the swelling preface of her breasts, but the linen beneath her dark muslin was yellowed and stained. Her eyes too seemed rheumy and bloodshot, as if not just the smoke but the idea of photography itself were taking its toll on all these inhabitants of 1843.

She looked long and hard at Peter, then smiled down at him from the man's lap; the poor fellow seemed to shrivel under the weight of her and the sudden obscurity of his position; she was ignoring him, turning him into an armchair after all; she pushed the plate out of the way and leaned forward. Her hands were long and thin and she folded them in front of her like braided bread. They were stained with what looked like ink; Peter could see dirt under her fingernails.
These
were the hands of a writer, he thought. She would write about him one day, even if she never saw him again. He knew this fact the way he knew the color of blood—why blood? he thought. Where had that come from?
Das Blut.

Or paint his picture and he would leave his mark on more than copper plate. Her mouth opened on tiny, uneven teeth. She winked and said something to him and he had no idea what she was talking about. The man under her hissed. And then she looked right into Peter's eyes without smiling and asked him his name.

So the drink diluted his vigilance—he was careless—and he leaned across the table and asked her to repeat the first part of her question. She touched him, or he
let
her touch him, and once more he felt the shifting pulse of dislocation. Assonant energy rippled across the room. The warm light of the oil lamps smudged into green, then red-amber; it congealed into brilliant, bleaching white for an instant, then shifted back to
red. The man whose lap she was sitting on said something—even with his heightened accommodation to the thoughts of his fellow art club members, Peter couldn't make it out, but he sensed the venom behind it—and she turned to him over her shoulder and spat in his face. Before she could get up the man pushed her from his lap, knocking over the table in the process, and all that was on it: beer and sausage, glass and crockery. Sauerkraut and loaves of dark bread and more beer and clots of mashed potato as people jumped away from the upset benches.

Peter retreated from the melee of crashes and raised voices as quickly as he could. He smiled and brushed at the froth of beer on his sleeve and bowed his way out of the immediate area. He found a place on the sidelines and shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment along with the others. In less than a minute he was out on the street.

The sun had set and apart from a few lighted windows in the near distance the faint glow of the western sky was all that showed the way along the lane back to the park. It took him longer than he thought it would—his legs seemed weighted down with mud-hobbled boots and his shoulders ached as if he had a pack on his back; and he was shivering uncontrollably by the time he finally found the spot in the scrubby border of the meadow where he had “touched down” that afternoon. The bottle was still where he had left it, but it was broken.

He lay on his back and clutched the fragments of brown glass to his chest. He closed his eyes and taking deep breaths of the cold night air tried to stop shivering and relax.

I should never have let her touch me. I should have left right after the photo session.
He sensed he had done irreparable damage to the course of things, irretrievable damage—to the
man he had been before coming here, or the world that he had left behind in the future: Peter Abbott born some day or other in 1963. It struck him as ironic, all of a sudden, that he should be the one they had sent back to disrupt the course of the world—someone who didn't really know the precise time and place of his own birth.

Maybe his body had found a new home like a displaced cat deciding the dish of milk outside the stranger's door was worth a transfer of affection. As if he had met with a distant ancestor in the exponential retro-branching of his family tree and in some subtle way eliminated himself from the twentieth century.

No. The universe wouldn't have done it that way; if he'd jeopardized his own existence he would have disappeared up his own bootstraps and been sucked through the holes for the shoelaces.
Like Ron Koch.
(Where had that name come from? Ron Koch—of course. From the countless strings of memory connected with Calliope. And Pam.) The universe eating its young—
don't fuck with the universe; it will eat you for breakfast.

Maybe he had affected something else; it was inevitable in a way, his being here like a sliver under the skin of things; the longer he remained, the more damage he was doing—even lying on his back he could still feel it in the weight of his shoulders; his own bones felt like lead pipes under his skin. He remembered how coming away from the tavern had been such a struggle for him (it couldn't have been that one glass of beer), each movement momentous, each adjustment of movement momentum-laden. Consequential.

.
.
.
(?)

Aphasia.

The word just came to him out of the blue—down from the sky. Along with a swift kick to his inner ear—he felt dizzy for a second and he had to find someplace to sit down. He touched his medal through his shirt. Pressed it into his sternum.

Simon knew what the word meant—brain damage that took away your powers of speech, your ability to handle language. This, of course, was one of his pet fears—his brain being the one thing he could trust, or had been able to trust
till now. Except for the obsessive-compulsive thing—which he could manage when he had the energy for it.

So this sense of loss struck him hard and got his heart pounding with the adrenaline rush of the realization that something had changed. Not out there in the view of the street and the cars passing by on the interstate, the huge
DAYS INN
sign. Nothing had changed out there; not the substance of it anyway. But the essence of it all had been transcribed—rewritten in a different key.

Or it was all just in his head and something fundamental to his way of looking at things had been tampered with. Maybe injured—which of course was what he feared most.

Or (this was another really terrifying scenario now that he thought about it) the way things appeared to him, the inventory of what he considered the sum total of his world, had been reorganized in some way. Interfered with.

But whatever it was, it wasn't “aphasia.” The fact that he had dug that word out of the rubble of his memory was testament to that. Wasn't it? That old rule-of-thumb that states, if you think you're crazy, you're not? Did that apply in this case?

“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers . . .” He said it to himself as a test—like flexing a pulled muscle. His mouth and brain negotiated the tongue twister with no trouble at all: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers . . . Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers . . . Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers . . . She sells seashells by the seashore . . . She sells seashells by the seashore . . . and he started to sing:
She said, sea shed .
.
.
”

And then he realized what had happened, what had been taken away from him. It was like a boomerang hurled into the
future that swings round and sneaks up on you down through the ages to cut off your head. Those garbled words were from “She Said She Said” an old Beatles thing. Like ashes in his mouth: stale, unborn song lyrics that came from a line of memory that suddenly seemed so far removed from who he was.

No Beatles. No White Album. No
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The world he was in now was suddenly hollow because of it; no one else would think so, of course; and part of his own sense of who he was seemed quite content not ever having seen
A Hard Day's Night
or sat transfixed in the dark with headphones on listening to
Abbey Road.
The revised edition of himself found solace in the twelve-bar ramblings of Muddy Waters and someone called Lonnie
McDowell
—the soundtrack of
Cabaret,
of all things. He was getting into jazz now, too: Thelonious Monk, and a new guy from Seattle, Jimmy Henderson.

He immediately blamed himself because there was no other explanation for it. Mr. Fix-It had fucked up. But how? He had been so careful, obsessively careful. And the Beatles had survived every adjustment; a constant in the peregrinations of pop culture, a permanent fixture in the living room of his reference points.

In reserve. A context he could always fall back on in times of need (
IN CASE OF CONVERSATIONAL EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS AND REMOVE BEATLES LYRICS AS NEEDED
): the armature that held the spindly Giacometti of himself upright.

No Beatles. Ever. Not in this version of things. Even the name, the Beatles, seemed so corny, so uncool. Aphasia again.

No White Album. Shit. He had taken it all for granted.

Sometimes in the middle of the night as he crossed the dark
boundary into dawn and he could no longer distract himself with television, or booze (he'd watch the growing light delineate the gaps in the deformed blinds of his hotel window—another day begun and he still had nothing to show for the one that had gone before it), he would fall on the bed and let himself drop into alpha and beta and then the floating place that opened up into the ether. He would find a place to settle down and listen to the Beatles (there was always someone somewhere in the world playing a Beatles record), and he would float for a while suspended above the roiling, white-noise sea of the world in general (in
real
time; no need to go foraging into the past) and tune in to a scrap of lyric or strand of melody and follow it down out of the ether like Theseus threading his way through the Labyrinth.

Try it now, go on, try it. Maybe your brain—part of it
anyway
—is corrupted, like a bad file on a disc drive—and that's all that's wrong with the world—you. Your brain is fried but the Beatles are just fine, man. Rock solid.

He settled onto the bed and did his best to relax and drop as quickly as he could into alpha.
Put the panic in a gunnysack and drop it down a well . . .
There. All your anxieties, one by one, down the well—this was an exercise he had learned somewhere along the way—from Jane, probably. Yes Jane: Jane Franklin. He saw her eyes then, her smooth, lustrous forehead (as perfectly round as the cap of a newel post), her breathy mezzo voice telling him how to do it—relax even if you are on the verge of panic . . . down, down . . .

Nothing.

Not a whisper. No Beatles, no Animals, no Rolling Stones. Nothing . . .

. . . Rosemary Clooney. Pat Boone. Neil Diamond. Wayne
Newton. Barry Manilow. Dean Martin. Frank Sinatra. Teresa Brewer . . .

No Beatles. He had done them in somewhere along the way—he would have to check it out and see where he'd gone wrong, scout the filament of history he was locked into—that was something he had learned early on in the game: he could only remote view the most recent version of his time line. To find anything in common with previous versions, he had to go back before any of them diverged. He could only track the latest version, not the countless alternative time lines he had parallel memories of.

Somehow he had interfered with the past in such a way that his actions had ricocheted back in time—a boomerang cutting the Beatles out of the picture.

He closed his eyes and focused on each strand of time line he had interfered with. He dropped into a trance and zeroed in on dates and places that might give him a clue.

Go further upstream—back, back . . .

The Beatles had come into full bloom even after he'd undone Anita in 1958. Everything had been fine right up until he had taken out Pam's father—and by extension, of course, Pam herself. But how could it happen in reverse? One adjustment in 1967 affecting the Liverpool music scene in the late fifties? Early sixties?

. . . down into the refuge of the undone—the past. Down the twig, down the branch of this world . . . to Liverpool, 1961. The Cavern Club. The whole Liverpool “Mersey Beat” scene . . .

Nothing; not a whiff—or a riff.

He slipped into the ether and dowsed his way back through
the weather maps at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, down through the years, then off the map across the ethereal ocean to Britain . . .

. . . falling back, further back now. Earlier than that: 1958, the Liverpool College of Art, the Jacaranda Club. A place John frequented; it was just around the corner from the school on Slater Street. . . . all as it should be, all in place. John Lennon's mother, Julia, hit by a car—fatally injured . . . Go with the current now: 1959, January 1960, February . . .

And there it was—the root of it all: the first silly little “house-that-Jack-built” element in the Rube Goldberg contraption (the flap-of-a-butterfly-wing flutter of air) that had set in motion the hurricane that was BEATLEMANIA.

The linchpin was a man called Bruno Koschmider, the man who had hired them to play in Hamburg, Germany.

Bruno Koschmider, the guy who had put them through the hell-hole boot camp of Hamburg's Reeperbahn red-light district. The man who had hired the Beatles to play the Indra Club and later the Kaiserkeller. (Simon knew this to be part of Beatles lore; he had read about it in enough books about them—
part
of him knew this.)

But in this time line Koschmider was nowhere to be found; the Indra Club was still a strip joint even in 1963—no rock and roll music on the Reeperbahn. No trip to Germany for John, Paul, George, and Pete Best. The band had remained a flaccid, second-rate act from, of all places, Liverpool. Destined to fail.

Hamburg, the crux of it all. Ground zero. But when? How far back had the damage been done?

Float on that word, hover there, wait, listen
. . . His medal
like the sphere that from across the room becomes a point: Yoko Ono had said that once, or wrote it—he couldn't remember.
Oh, yeah .
.
.
Yoko Ono.

. . . a wave of something: a shiver of expectancy rippled through the chain of his medal. A nibble.

Peter Abbott—there like a cloud passing across the sun .
.
.
what has he got to do with it? Hamburg/Peter Abbott/H
ambur
g/Peter Abbott—inseparable. Joined at the hip, at the crux of what was ill with the world.

The thing Simon hadn't considered till now was the possibility of Peter Abbott actually taking the initiative. His impression of the guy had never allowed for that sort of open-endedness. The fact that he was an actor had made
Simon
see him this way—as a man who only pretended to live. As someone who could only be a mouthpiece for someone else's “gusto,” for want of a better word. The thing that separated the liv
ers
from the liv
ees.

The little respect he had for him was really fear in a new suit of clothes, he realized now. Peter Abbott was the only other person who knew what he had done—remembered all the things, all the people he had
un
done—which was why the idea of getting rid of Pam first had been such an inspired decision, at the time. The sadist in him had clouded his judgment.

But now with the Beatles gone, he knew the guy was capable of getting back at him. Peter was playing the same game now—not just going back to observe anymore, but doing it too—touching down. Corporeal manifestation in the past.

He thought about the stillness of a pool in the early morning before the first dive, the curve of the planet scribed in the arc of meniscus. Like that. Perfect, unsullied. The further back he went, the cleaner the picture. Pristine, undisturbed.

He could go back to virgin territory and fix it all. But how far back? Where? In what place at what time? On what branch grew the twig he could bend and nurture and deform enough to set things back on their right course?

Entropy was working against him now. This will happen; that won't (but this will come out of that not happening quite like what could have happened if—and on and on). He yearned for the majestic power that could turn the world into a projector running backwards: the obsessive/compulsive luxury of a replay button (some things worked the same backwards and forwards, billiard balls, subatomic particles—the macro mimicking the micro: he'd read all about that somewhere), the truly surreal vision of spilled water leaping from the floor back into the un-knocked-over bucket.

Relax. Regroup in the past,
he told himself.
Use a bit of finesse.
Simon had a new respect for the power of his craft now—a tentative soft-stepping reverence that defined the reach of his grasping curiosity—a respect for the massive camshafts and flywheels of a universe that would not allow him the freedom of a good joke.

Fuck the finesse—fuck it all.
Hubris, pride cometh before the fall; strike when the iron is hot—all that shit. Too big for your britches . . .
I should have picked him off right then, when I figured out his fucking birth date.

Peter Abbott. Shit.

He went outside into the cool morning air, out to the main road beyond the motel parking lot. The breeze made him hunch his shoulders and he turned his whole body east to where the sky was brightening and the interstate cut through open countryside. A thread of highway that linked this no-place-of-a-place in the middle of Arizona to the ab
solutes of humankind, he realized then. The movement of traffic was cozy and familiar like the flicker of a fireplace, the passing cars and trucks a ticking clock, a Geiger counter of commerce—blood and coffee driving people in the direction of accomplishment. They actually believed they were going somewhere. And for a moment he wanted to believe it too, the innocent simplicity of a life free of cynicism.

“Aphasia.” Maybe there was something he could do to his brain to eliminate the sarcasm, the compulsive need to find irony in everything.

He turned back around to the west, where the sun splashed the foothills with peach light. That the sun had already risen on the mountains confused him for a moment—moving west set back the clock, didn't it? Delayed things? The potential was held in abeyance on the West Coast; the kinetic more kinetic because of that: a fulfillment of East Coast yearnings. The immigrant stranger in his own land. Go west, young man. What made LA such a crazy fucking place, “Tinseltown” so tawdry. The “there” was somewhere else.