A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (10 page)

Dancing with the weather vane at Pimlico

“There was this horse once, this name that came to me, the night before the Preakness, back in 1973, I think it was—I must've been—oh, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Anyway this name comes to me in the night—this voice in my ear saying, ‘Pepper Mill' or ‘Paper Mill'—something like that.”

“Yeah? So what did you do?” Anita was lying on her stomach, her paperback splayed and spine-cracked under her elbow; she was smoking a cigarette with that droopy-eyed enjoyment that seemed like something from another time.

“Nothing. I did nothing.” Ron shifted so that the chair, a
collaboration of steel tubing and rubber straps, skittered for an instant as two of the legs repositioned themselves on the concrete. “It came in seventy-four to one, I found out later. If I took the trouble to check the
Racing Form
I would've seen a three-year-old named Paper Mile running that day in the third at Woodbine.”

“You were young.”

“Young?” He shook his head, thinking youth had nothing to do with it. “Stupid” was the word that came to mind. He said it: “I was stupid.”

She didn't disagree with him but got up on one knee in a slow, economical swivel till she was sitting facing him—
somewhere
along the way she'd managed to get one last drag out of her cigarette and stub it out in her Coke can. She was wearing her floral job today, Ron noticed—the one with a short fringe like a tennis skirt attached to it.

“Couple of years ago I was helping the police in Iowa to find this young kid who had taken his father's brand-new four-by-four out for the weekend with some of his buddies; he never showed up where they were supposed to meet—vanished into thin air. They found the vehicle two weeks later on a container ship heading for, Singapore, I think it was. They called me in to help track him down and I kept getting this flash of a parking garage, car noises, car alarms amplified by all those, you know, bouncing off the walls? I kept telling myself that's impossible, the kid's hometown had nothing like a parking garage anywhere near the place.” For a moment, she looked off toward the ocean, where the breeze was coming from. “So I second-guessed myself and told them to concentrate on places near freeways, places near lots of traffic. Gas stations on the interstate.”

Ron nodded, knowing what was coming, looking down at his feet—not since he was a kid had they looked like that: tanned, burned really. On top between the straps of his sandals. “A couple of days later his body showed up wedged behind a Dumpster in a Des Moines parking garage.” She said this while taking out another one of her Camels, tapping it out of the pack, hunched over like a man would do, Ron thought.

Ronald Koch had come to the understanding that he deserved better. Not now, at this present juncture in his life—that was working out just fine, what with this fancy new job in a place where you didn't have to comment on how nice the weather was; the people he was meeting, interesting people. One in particular, if he were to be honest about it: Anita; he was growing quite fond of Anita. He missed the track, the routine of it, being around horses all his life it was understandable, but he could see how a break from it all was doing him some good.

What was bugging him was that he was beginning to see the potential of all those years he'd let slide by; the missed opportunities—the hunches he should have gone with.

What they were teaching him here was absolutely incredible: they sat him in this padded chair and turned down the lights, got him to relax and wait for the pictures, the impressions of the “target.” This was the first stage, the “Passive” stage—much like picking horses. Listening to your gut.

They were so happy with his progress they were fast-tracking him into the “Active” stage—actually telling him to take his mind somewhere, to ride what they called the “ether,” a sort of out-of-body thing combined with what they called “remote viewing.” Just this morning they'd given him these coordinates; three numbers and a date, November something.
And he'd gone off into his trance: the “GH,” they called it—the ganzfeld/hypnagogic. And there he was, in a place that felt cold, of all things, like it was January back home in fucking Hamilton. He could hear it all too—the crowd and marching bands and the floats: huge inflated cartoon balloons on cables, the crowds lining the street, the dull gray sky over Central Park, a few flakes actually coming down, hitting the road and melting right away. It was like watching a movie—a movie you could move around in. He could smell exhaust—old exhaust, antique exhaust—pre-catalytic converter exhaust. Exhaust full of lead. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It had to be. At one point, it was as if he were standing in the crowd at ground level, but above it all at the same time—dangling at the end of a guy wire like Mickey Mouse.

What he noticed just before he lost it—he couldn't have been there more than a minute—was that all the men were wearing hats, fedoras, some with scarves over their ears but with a fedora on top of it. Lots of wool coats and rubber
galoshes
—clean white shirts and ties. The forties or early
fifties
—he was surrounded by men and women dressed like his uncles and aunts, like when he was a kid and they came to visit for the holidays, only this time he was looking down on them, not up. An adult among adults.

When he came out of it he went through the routine interview session; he couldn't shake the feeling that if he'd given it a bit more effort he could have made a place for himself there, not just seen it and felt it, but actually been there,
physically,
in the crowd on that day back in 1955 or whenever it was.

The technician assigned to him for the session, Blenheim, looked at Ms. Franklin and said, “That's a good sign, wouldn't you say?” His voice was like some radio announcer's voice,
and Ron lay there in the recliner thinking, this guy could say anything and people would listen to him with a voice like that. Women especially, he figured. His own voice always seemed squeaky whenever he heard it on tape.

The oddest thing was Ms. Franklin asking him his age again, the year he was born—stuff he'd already told them that first day he was here. He told them again: “Nineteen-forty-five, June eighteenth,” and Blenheim wrote it down on the big yellow pad he always used for these “debriefings.” Big letters, hard with his pen, as if he were trying to push it through onto the other pages so it would be there for every session, big and bold like his voice.

“We'll have to be careful of that in the future,” Ms. Franklin said then. Ron had no idea what that meant—that he was too old for this sort of thing? Maybe his astrology was off—no Geminis on Apollo missions? He didn't bother asking. If he started he wouldn't be able to stop. He was used to taking orders and doing things by rote; doing things that didn't make sense. Working around horses you learn sometimes to look the other way and just get on with it.

But this all got him to thinking: if he could go back and see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and actually feel the cold, smell the place, maybe he could do more than just
observe
—which is all they wanted him to do. Maybe he could actually open his mouth and make a noise back there. Maybe he would try that the next time, try and grab someone by the arm and scream in their face—see what happens. Get right out there on the road in the middle of the fucking parade itself and do a little dance; grab one of the pretty women from the crowd and do the tango, maybe.

.
.
.
finding vertical with a broken wing

Simon called Janis at the house in Vancouver and told her if she settled up with the landlord for him and cleaned out his apartment she could take anything she wanted—sell the rest, whatever, give it away—he wasn't coming back. Yes, even his new Bose stereo system. He'd left with three suitcases full of most of his clothes and all of his Beatles records.

His White Album: the cover was stained and mildewed, the records themselves gray with minute scratches and dust; but his new CD version had turned the original into a museum
piece—the aging, yellowing cover seemed appropriate now, like the wattles under Paul McCartney's chin.

Simon tried to recall when he'd first heard it; whether his parents had played it around the house or in the car when he was small—to him the Beatles were ancient history by the time he started listening to music—or whether it all came out of the Manson connection, how Manson had been obsessed with the White Album, the lyrics telling him to kill. Helter Skelter. Revolution 9.

He'd bought this particular copy in a used-record store on Granville Street after seeing a documentary about Charles Manson on TV. He'd watched this guy blather on about Revelation and getting clear and how Hitler had “leveled the karma of the Jews” or some such shit, but he couldn't help noticing what he did with his eyes, how they launched more than they took in.

In his room at Calliope, he took the White Album out of his suitcase and placed it on the dresser, opening it up like a greeting card. The reflection in the mirror making the whole thing into an X of dirty white—a double, double album. What would the mirror image of a record sound like? The same? Different? But how? Like those chemical compounds with a right-hand and a left-hand version, the molecules asymmetrical, how one could be a benign carbon chain and the other a deadly poison. He remembered how the song “Revolution 9” had this strange baritone chant running through it that sounded like, “Nubba Ny-un, Nubba Ny-un, Nubba Ny-un”; how when you played it backwards it turned out to be a voice saying something like “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.”

Watching the fuss the world had made of Manson, Simon
couldn't figure out why this jerk who had done so many despicable things could end up as famous as Jesus Christ. Almost as famous as John Lennon.

There was something about fame that had always confounded him: how someone can take on an importance that seems to hold itself up by its own bootstraps. The echoes of it in magazines or on TV transcending the physical source of it all. The person diminished by personality. Like the old joke about the cyst on the guy's nose getting so big it ends up having the guy removed.

Like that actor who was working here at Calliope: Peter something. Reasonably successful, it sounded like, good-
looking
, he guessed, for a guy his age—thirty-two, thirty-five, maybe—no beer gut yet, still had all his hair. But a nonentity as far as the big picture was concerned. Where the person ended and the personality began he couldn't tell.

There were times when Simon saw himself as a diver still—a celebrated athlete—a diver who had gone on to the Seoul Olympics in '88, won a medal for his country, his face on the front of a Wheaties box—this other Simon living a parallel life to his own, this golden boy who hadn't smashed his head on that diving board when he was sixteen. One small mistake and in the eyes of the world you become a cipher.

It don't matter a fuck what you do—just make sure the whole world knows you did it—YOU did it!
That's what he saw in Charlie Manson's eyes. Personality, in the end, bigger than good or evil—in a league by itself.

His dream was that one day he could sit down at a computer and do a search on the Net—just key in his name:
Simon + Hayward
, and come up with about 624,291 hits. That's what it was all about.

Simon's headache had gone and the ringing was now a faint harmonic of the susurrating sea beyond his window. Something to do with the weather, the lifting of the clouds, air pressure on his inner ear, he figured.

He was growing to like it here; the sunshine linked inextricably to daylight. The sun would come up and you could track it in the cloudless sky all day. And what they were actually paying him to do—he'd always thought of as a secret disability, a guilty pleasure.

They had shown him the relaxation technique with the Ping-Pong balls on his eyes. They had set up a situation where he was supposed to rise out of his body and see what was in the room above the lab. He'd done this kind of thing when he was a kid, at night when he couldn't sleep. He used to call them his “Night Dives.” He'd contort this other part of himself out of his body and do flips and somersaults up near the ceiling. As a child he'd never been able to get any farther than that.

In the last session they'd wanted him to check out the room on the floor above and report back to them, as if he were a spy behind enemy lines. He'd approached it like a dive off the springboard, the rhythm of it like a dance; he remembered what his coach had taught him about how to use a song to pace himself: “When you push off you should hear the board bounce twice before you come back down on it.”

He'd used “Blackbird” this time—from the White Album:

. . . up, out of himself—a slow tumble, legs together, straightening, headfirst through the stucco ceiling. A big empty attic space, a steel box, hovering now, among the ex
posed rafters, poised between moves. His kinetic memory still working for him. Orienting him.

Down toward the steel box on the floor in the center of the room, an effortless glide, head, eyes, slicing through the lid.

His medal clanging like a banged pot lid sliding into dishwater as it passed through the walls of the box. But it was only a replica of his medal.
Everything I'm wearing here with me—my clothes, even my fillings—what's left of my breakfast,
he thought.

In the box he found a roll of film: standard 35 mm, Kodak; he let his hand linger, feeling the slick surface, then down into the layers of exposed emulsion. This shot, that, one after the other, the first exposure an image of paper folded into the form of a bird—a crane, an origami crane out of newspaper. The next one an upturned silver goblet, the next a lighthouse on a craggy coastline. A head-and-shoulders shot of a young woman with what looked like a compact disc between her teeth; a picture of an antique bus parked beside an office building—he worked through the whole roll: twenty-four exposures in all.

Simon knew what they were up to—it was like an eye chart; they wanted to see how deeply he could penetrate this multileveled pastiche of odd data, how far down the line of connections he could go before it all blurred his inner vision.

He opened his eyes and stretched; Jane Franklin's face, wide-eyed, unblinking, inches from his—the scent of her like coming home. He swallowed and sat up; Blenheim handed him a glass of water.

“Well?” Jane said, sitting down, picking up a pad and pull
ing off the top of her pen with her teeth, ready to roll.
Ready to play with their new toy,
Simon thought.

“Well what?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Big goose egg.”

“‘Nothing'? You were into theta in less than thirty seconds,” Blenheim said, coming around to face him. He looked saddened by it all, rather than frustrated.

“Well I just—nothing happened, okay? A bit of a light show, random shit, you know—but no out-of-body, sorry.”

Jane looked up from her pad. “You want to give it another go?” Big brown eyes smiling at him with a playful pleading, a bit of pout about the lips. The way her long neck turned into her chin line. How could he lie to the prospect of maybe one day in the near future—“I don't think I can go through that again today. I really, I really gave it my best shot. Maybe tomorrow. Okay?”

He would keep them in the dark for now, keep them guessing. Not let on how much progress he was making. Not show his hand right away.

And besides; Jane might be there for him—after hours, maybe—to help him with his homework.