A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (9 page)

that can tie you up, tie you down,

Put you through the
PACES,
another day at the
RACES

Make you nego-ti-
ATE,
with the
HATE
monga'

just to live
LONG
a' than your kids . . .

The man can't
STOP,
you
COP
ulate.

Can't stop you
POP
ulate this town, this world,

this
PLAN
et
SUR
face.
MAN
it
SERVES
us right,
NOW!

We're gonna spread the
NEWS!

Let the satellite
SPREAD
the news!

On the web site spread the
NEWS! . . .

His wife pushed herself away from the table, scraping her chair across the floor, her hanky flicking and flapping like a white bat in the faint light; she whimpered and shrieked, and bounced in her chair. She stood up then, and fanned the air as if fending off an angry wasp. Dr. Stuart suddenly fell back into his chair and slumped sideways like a discarded marionette, his lolling head coming to rest in Sarah Pope's lap.

Silent now. His eyes were closed and his disheveled hair fell about his ears and face like the swirls of flattened grain in a field where a dust devil has touched down.

Mr. Smith was on his feet, his hand on the shoulder of Mrs. Stuart. His carnation looked like a blasphemy. She was sobbing in earnest now, working the handkerchief into a damp knot. Rathburn was at his notebook, getting it all down while it was still fresh in his mind, his heart pumping, his pipe cold, smokeless, wobbling under his nose as his teeth worked with the scratch and chatter of his pen at transcribing Dr. Stuart's strange utterances into legible words.

Sarah Pope smiled and closed her eyes as if what had just transpired was no more dismaying than a change in the weather. Her small hand absently smoothed the fine wisps of hair that fell like a frond across her thigh. The top of Dr. Stuart's head was surprisingly cool—the faintly livid shoreline
near his temple dotted with pearl drops of perspiration. It was heavy, though, his head. Heavier than she had ever imagined a man's head would be.

“Llewelyn. You're a
very
naughty boy.”

“Llewelyn? Are you listening?”

The rock meets the hard place . . .

The unmarked Calliope shuttle pulled up in front of the main entrance just as Peter was heading out for his morning walk into town. The sun was a palpable adversary even at nine in the morning here, and he noticed that the man stepping down from the van was wearing a heavy black overcoat. It was open, at least, and the young guy—he couldn't have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five—had sunglasses on; as if his only concession to the climate came out of a need to adjust the brightness on his inner TV screen. Something to do with his age, Peter thought—born after the first moon landing.

Later on he found the young guy alone at a table on the patio with a newspaper and a bowl of cereal, undressed now, in a swimsuit, a towel over his shoulders, a gold chain with a pendant of some sort around his neck; bare feet, the toes looking like they had spent too much time in closed quarters.

“You must be Peter Abbott. You look the part, if you don't mind me saying—no,
seriously,
I had this rap session with Eli or whatever his name is. Gave me a list of all you people. You
look
like an actor.” He took another spoonful of his Cheerios, slurping slightly at the milk the way some people think they can get away with eating cereal—kiddy food.

He had hair that looked as dense as cat fur, only stiffer: short but sticking up, his hairline straight and low on his forehead. What used to be called a brush cut—before earrings and platinum highlights became acceptable accessories to this kind of haircut.

“My name's Simon, by the way, Simon Hayward.” He reached over and extended his hand; the thing around his neck—it looked like a St. Christopher medal—ticked against the edge of his cereal bowl.

Peter took his hand and regretted it right away—an electric tingling reached his shoulder before he could let go: Simon Hayward was angry about something—really angry. Water; Peter saw water, deep blue water and felt a stab of pain between his eyes. Then gone—that quick. Defenses up immediately. Agile, like a boxer's party, Peter thought; a toned muscle at work here.

“So what have I seen you in?”

“Pardon?”

“Movies, TV, you know. Stuff I could have seen you in.”

“Oh. I don't know. A few commercials. Stage stuff,
mostly.
Les Miz
a few years back. The New York production. ‘
Mega
-musicals,' they call them now—big budgets, long runs. Like working for the government in some ways.” Simon Hayward was back at his cereal, not really listening.

“What have I seen
you
in?” Peter said after a moment—while the guy's furry head was still down. He could see a scar now, a gap in the thatch, an arcing line about two inches long right on top of his head.

“Me?” He looked up and smiled; his tongue patrolling his lower lip for milk. “A bar in Vancouver maybe. I'm a waiter, sometimes a bartender. Were you in that one . . .
Showboat
? I met this girl who was in it, played a dancer or something. A flapper from the twenties, something like that. You weren't in that at all?”

Peter shook his head and tried to construct a life that this lad could have led till now. The water confused him, the color of it; the smell and taste of it—not salt, something else. Chlorine. He looked fit enough, tanned. Here on the patio in a swimsuit but sitting as far away from the pool as he could get.

Peter went inside for some coffee and a muffin. When he got back, Thornquist was at Simon's table with his hat in his lap, using his listing puppy dog smile—playing the host. He welcomed Peter with a crack about actors being late
risers
—“Your curtain doesn't rise with the sun, I see—” and told Simon that Peter was an actor. Simon said he knew that, which left Peter with nothing to say or do but nod his head and take a bite out of his muffin.

“Well, it's good to have you here, Simon.” Thornquist gazed about him looking bored all of a sudden, setting his hat on his knee and shaping the crown. “I think we're just about done—a full complement.” He stood up. “We've got
one more coming in, in a day or so, as a backup. A young lady from New York.” He touched Peter's shoulder and leaned in beside his ear. “An
unde
r
study, I guess you'd call her,” he said, his eyes on Simon, demanding a reaction.

He started to walk away and did this schtick Peter couldn't help thinking he must have used at least three times already today: the “Columbo” maneuver, his feigned forgetfulness. “Oh, Mr. Hayward. One more thing. I wonder if you wouldn't mind holding on to this for a day or so, tell me what you think might be inside it.” The small metal box again—or one just like it. This one was labeled “18.” He held it up, then placed it on top of Simon's newspaper.

Simon straightened up in his chair, and for an instant Peter saw jaw muscles flex. He'd backed into sunlight and it fell across his face with an oblique cut of shadow that made his chin disappear into his chest and his nose larger than it really was. Francis Bacon, Peter thought. Like one of Bacon's portraits.

He sniffed once and glanced at Peter with a half turn, blinking and squinting away the glare, his mouth absently working at his Cheerios. He picked up the metal box and sliced through the paper seal with his spoon; he flipped it open and fished out a ring, a plastic, lime-green ring. “Looks like a kid's ring to me—with a face on it, a pig,
Porky
Pig maybe.”

“Very good, Mr. Hayward. Top marks,” Thornquist said, reaching out to touch him on the shoulder—slap him on the back, maybe—then changing his mind.

Simon turned his head to look at him with his eyebrows up in a dismayed frown. His jaw was flexing again. Peter figured he'd been hoping to get a rise out of Thornquist.

“You're the first one to do that and I commend you. It
wasn't exactly what we had in mind, but why use a sledgehammer to break an egg, or swat a fly, or whatever that expression is . . . very good. Or should I say ‘spoon' in this case?
Very
good.”

Simon was looking the other way now, pretending not to be listening to any of it. He was fiddling with the ring, trying it on. He settled on the little finger of his left hand, then turned in his chair so the sun was behind him. He raised his hand so they could all see how nice it looked on his pinky. “Can I keep it?”

The Lion, the Witch, and the Little Tin Box

Pam liked everything about a plane flight. Even the food: the plastic tray, the ice-cold cutlery, the ritual of taking all those seals off everything; the portions, like something served in a dollhouse restaurant—like the bars of soap in motels. The takeoffs were the best; the feel of the plane under her butt reminded her of being on a playground swing, her father, invisible behind her, giving her that majestic boost. She had no real memory of his face, just the force of his pumping arms.

She hadn't done much flying in her life—once to Denver on a high school ski trip, a flight out of Newark to a job in
terview with a software company in Philadelphia—this had been just after college, when she had thought that starting a career would be a way of growing out of it, her old self, her real self—the one she could never escape, she had come to realize since.

And now here she was on a plane heading for another job interview—all the way to St. Martin. Calliope had gotten her address from her brother, Tom. And being the kind of brother he was he had done some sleuthing before giving it to them. “They seem legit—into, you know, what you're good at,” he had said on the second call to her, left in the fog of tape hiss on her ancient simulated wood-grain Radio Shack answering machine. “Call me if you need to, Pam baby. Love you.” Thomas was a landscape architect. He was good with plants and trees and seeing how they would all fit together around a house; it showed in how he dealt with everything. The way he saw her life turning out; if he could, he would prune her into something he could put a little tag on—a Latin name for what she was and where she'd come from, how much light and water she needed, what type of soil. He had lived through the days when her gift had been a curse, the times when her mother would back away from her as if she had something catching. He had spent a lot of his own childhood protecting his little sister—mostly from herself.

What she was good at.

The lady across the aisle from her was gasping for air all of a sudden, the fingers of her hand like four wax birthday candles pressed cold against the armrest. White and bloodless.

“It's okay—we're not going to crash. I know that for a fact,” Pam said quietly. The woman kept her eyes closed; she swallowed and her breathing eased up a little. Pam wondered
what people thought when she made pronouncements like that. (Sometimes she
knew
what they thought.) Some were hostile, most were indifferent. This woman was smiling now, in gratitude for the distraction, if nothing else. A flight attendant came by, intervening, offering a drink of water and smiling at Pam as a way of saying she was the professional and she would take over from here. Skinny legs under a blue skirt, red scarf—deep-set, tired eyes. In the instant the uniform skirt fabric brushed against her shoulder Pam picked up on the state of the poor woman's bank account—she saw her in a leaky boat; and a man with a bailing bucket doing it all backwards, scooping the water in. That was the one thing she didn't like about plane flights—the closeness, the forced intimacy.

When the stewardess came back with the woman's water Pam asked her for a Bloody Mary. That would do it—a real drink. And her Walkman—Snoop Doggy Dog; Prince's new one. Drown it all out till she could walk away from the buzz that was building and shaping itself like an arc of iron filings around the field of her head.

St. Martin. An island. She suddenly realized she was almost thirty and she'd never left the continental U.S. before—did Liberty Island count?—never flown over the ocean.

What you're good at.

Picking out scratch-and-win lottery tickets for pocket money; that time she worked as a palm reader at an SF convention in Atlantic City. Actually touching the sweaty hands of guys with acne dressed up in tacky, handmade Star Fleet uniforms. And that fucking Fortune 2000 shit; she would never let herself get involved in anything like that again. “Calliope Associates”—she liked the sound of it—a salary plus
benefits; a dental plan.
Please, God. Make it happen this time. A real job for once; something I'm good at.

She dug her bag out from between her feet and fished around till she came up with the journal she'd taken from the library of the psychic research place off Central Park West. She flipped through it, finding the entry again—June 10, 1919. Maybe Spin da' Spool K had beaten her to it and read this book somehow—ripped it off to make his CD. Or the people at the séance had picked it up from the future, tuning in to MTV somehow.

No.
I
did it. It's all my work.

She stuffed it back in her bag and closed her eyes, trying hard not to let her arm touch the sleeve of the man sitting next to her; he smelled of tarnished copper—that's the only thing she could connect it with—and that old-banana chemical smell of one-hour photo places. He was reading this computer manual but she sensed he wasn't really concentrating.

My résumé,
she thought.
My eighty-year-old résumé.
There was nothing she could actually put on a regular résumé, nothing that wouldn't do more harm than good anyway—but if they asked her for one, she was ready for them.

“I can't bend spoons or anything like that.”

“We don't want you to bend spoons.”

“In fact, most of the time I just get these voices in my head; I was once diagnosed as schizo but the doctor changed his mind when I started telling him about his girlfriend; the latest one his wife didn't know anything about.”

“We're going to teach you to travel away from your body, get you into remote viewing—astral projection is what it's traditionally known as; traveling clairvoyance—have you ever
had any out-of-body experiences? Have you ever felt you're—that you were floating away from your body?”

“Oh, I do it all the time—not
all
the time but, you know—when I want to.” Jane looked over at Thornquist but he kept punching at his laptop.

“I sort of go inside myself, close my eyes, this hiding place I used to call it, when I was a kid, like folding myself up in a warm blanket; then it sort of—I don't know—opens up, I guess. Into this white spaciness, when it just takes off from there.” She cleared her throat and smiled, and Jane could see how her eyes did what they did—make you feel like the center of her universe; she could dilate the pupils at will. She was into her leather knapsack again, coming up with a roll of cough drops this time.

“When I was a kid, I used to make up this place that was something like Narnia. You know those books?” Jane nodded, and Eli shifted in his chair—he had his laptop in his lap and he looked uncomfortable. “Anyway, it got kind of spooky after a while so I stopped going there.”

“What do you mean, ‘spooky'?”

“This one character, or creature, whatever, this little faun creature I really liked, started touching me or trying to touch me—I was only, oh, eight years old; it scared the shit out of me.”

Jane Franklin realized then what had been puzzling her about Pam's face—the pronounced squareness of it. Not so much a squareness—that would imply a heavy jawline—but rather the facetedness of it (a
WANTED
flyer on a Post Office wall would show her as two different people). The broad cheekbones defined the shape of it head-on, flattening and diminishing the nose and making her eyes seem smaller than
they really were; but in profile she looked fine-boned, patrician, the line of the forehead to the tip of the nose a modulated sign wave.

Thornquist unburdened himself of his laptop and stood up. “Do you know what psychometry is, Miss Gilford?” His hand was in his jacket pocket; he took out a small metal box. Pam thought for an instant it was cigarettes or snuff, or chewing tobacco; but he just stood there with it clenched in his liver-spotted hand. Pam noticed his nails then, how neat they looked—manicured, prided over. And she knew right away he didn't smoke or take snuff; but he did have one vice that he kept hidden from most of his associates at Calliope.

“The word itself is derived from the Greek. The word
psyche
, for ‘soul,' and
metron
, meaning ‘measure.' When you handle objects it's not just the information you're picking up on. It's a process that transcends time and space—”

“What Eli's trying to say is, it's more than what the mass media would have us believe.” Jane wondered what Eli was getting at; why he'd chosen this moment to make one of his speeches. She put it down to the way he'd been sitting with the laptop on his knees—the way it had channeled the blood through his old body.

“Well. I
do
it, if that's what you're getting at,” Pamela said, pushing hair behind her ear and leaning over to put the roll of cough drops back in her bag. “All the time. I make a good living at it.” The question in both their faces prompted her to explain. “Lottery tickets, the scratch-and-win kind. I thought you knew that already.” Eli turned away from them both, then back to Jane. He was smiling and shaking his head. There was a glassiness to his eyes Jane found hard to interpret, but he kept on smiling—one of his real smiles this time.

“You've got one in that box, haven't you?” Pam said. “Minnesota State Lottery. It's worth nothing, by the way. You wasted a buck.” She wanted to tell him to stick to roulette, but she didn't. She would hold that back for now; just like she would hold off on showing them the book she'd taken from the psychical research library in New York.

“I love the sixties, man. So much happened in the sixties. But the fucking tacky, blindsided seventies. Wow, fucking goofy bell-bottoms, tacky, tacky, tacky in my estimation . . . the birth of bubble gum and disco knitwear—Rococo-cola crap, man. All of it. Give me the Baroque—the restraint of the Baroque, you know what I mean? Especially the first half of the sixties . . . the Beatles' early stuff, those first few James Bond movies . . .

“People did outrageous stuff but were cool about it, you know? Like the Kennedy thing. Lee Harvey Oswald would probably have an album out by now if he were still alive. A whole section in Sam Goody's right next to Ozzy Osbourne. That fucking Jack Ruby: a little shit with a little gun. Fucked up everything.” Simon laughing now, at the egregious thing he'd just said, covering up with a cool, head-dipping jive to the rumble rhythm of the Muzak, the beeps and chimes and the occasional machine-gun payoff in the background.

He was not holding his liquor too well, Peter thought. Two beers and a slammer had brought Simon into the suburbs of fall-down-drunk.

Late at night in a casino near Mullett Bay. Ron Koch off somewhere playing the slots; “feeling for the loose ones,” he said. In the faint blue light from neon piping around the drop ceiling that hung like an inverted Noah's ark over the semicir
cular bar, Peter could see the scar on the top of Simon's head. The scar he'd just heard the genesis of, heritage of—the day of the big diving meet that went wrong; the world's fault, not Simon's, the dive skewed by external influences—the blood, the stitches, the aftermath: “If it hadn't been for that, I would've gone on to Seoul, you know what I mean? The Olympics.” The significance of the medal around his neck: “She gave it to me just before the last dive. My mother.” He shook his head. “Afterwards she wanted to burn it or something, grind it up and throw it in the ocean. I wouldn't let her near it. No way, man.” He pulled it out of his shirt just in case they hadn't noticed it yet.

Peter took another look at his straight-up brush cut that was like a forest with a slash-and-burn clearing off to one side just beyond his hairline. A glistening blue highlighted line of oily scalp.

Ron came over with a paper cup full of quarters and bought them all another round. Another Heineken for Peter, another slammer for Simon. “There's a guy over there playing
blackjack
—hundred-dollar chips, for Christ's sake—” He shook his head. “I swear, he was taking a hit on an eighteen. Twice he did that . . .”

At the same time Simon was saying, “God, I love this place . . . shit,” swiveling his padded stool around to watch a young woman in a long tight skirt make her way through the crowd—taking his voice down to a stage whisper, Peter thought. Still loud as hell, though: “Look at the ass on that one. Christ, you could—”

“You ever tried it in a place like this?” Peter said to Ron, gesturing an “out there” with his drink hand. “The way you do it with the horses?”

Ron was shaking his head before he'd finished. “It's not the same; it's all chance. There's no finesse to it, except in blackjack, maybe—a little bit of skill. All this, this random shit, too much noise—I tried it once with the 649—it's a lottery up in Canada—the relaxation thing before I fell asleep, telling myself to dream the numbers—” He shook his head, smiling. “Numbers are hard, too abstract maybe. With horses it's different; they're flesh and blood, living things.” He nudged his paper cup of quarters. “The slots—I think I'm just imagining it. The luck of the draw like anybody else.”

On cue there was a sleigh-bell jingle and clatter of a one-armed-bandit payoff somewhere on the other side of the floor; a potted siren sound and now flashing lights—car-alarm urgent, but in a good way, like New Year's Eve.