A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (20 page)

Browsing the ether . . .

“Just tell me you have a target. I don't need this coordinate stuff. It only confuses me.”

“Don't tell Ingo Swann that,” Susan said, adjusting the light over the desk.

“What?”

“Ingo Swann. One of the pioneers. Really legendary remote viewer—I actually met him once in New York, at an exhibition of his paintings. Worked for SRI in the eighties. Stanford Research Institute? Devised a relatively foolproof remote viewing procedure using geographic coordinates
called SCANATE. He swore by it, trained a lot of remote viewers in it. For some people it just didn't make any difference, though—whether they were given actual coordinates or not. Like you, I guess,” Susan said, setting out the pen and paper. “Now
Simon
—he needs coordinates. Larry too, but sometimes he gets them wrong. Anita and Peter, they need a link.”

Pam didn't like the recliner either—it made her think of dentists and gynecologists, doctors in general: she hated them with a passion. She preferred this kind of session, where they let her sit at a desk, go into a trance, and doodle on a huge sheet of paper—or chatter on about whatever was coming through. It was sort of like going on a vacation and giving someone the play-by-play over the phone.

“By the way, there's no target; we just want to see how far you can go, where it takes you. We're going to let you off the leash for this one.” She smiled and said, “Okay, Pam, it's time,” putting on her soothing bedside manner voice. That's all Pam needed—one cue. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander—finally drifting into alpha near-sleep, her finger coming up to her mouth once, before she fell into a deep slide through darkness, light swirls, then darkness again. She felt her body slump back into the chair.

This freewheeling approach to remote viewing was like tuning in distant shortwave radio signals—it was a slow, perpendicular scan of energies and static, and lopsided voices—as if she were the needle on the tuner drifting up and down the wave band. The ether as shopping mall. She was window shopping, brushing up against the merchandise, then drifting away, coming down to touch it, floating up and away again, till something else caught her attention . . .

. . . the smell of horse dung, and sweat, horse breath turning to mist in the cool morning air, a dank gray sky off in the distance over rolling fields, frozen lightning-bolt silhouettes of leafless tree branches high above her head. The thudding of restless hooves, snorts, and the rattle of tack—and a male voice heavy with dialect: “This one 'ere ought not be afeared as much as your mount.”

“Aye. An' thank God the rain be abated. This'n 'ld 'ave me arse over end if we come to mud.” Then something under his breath she could not even break out into words of any kind.

The man who had spoken first dismounted—he was short and thick around the waist; his soft cap was tied under his bearded chin like a scarf—and another man with long dark hair wearing a short leather jacket took the reins of the suddenly skittish horse.

The scene transposed into bright light now, the rant of many horses galloping by; then the squeal of something pig-like; the smell of fear, the sound of angry voices and ringing steel . . .

Car horns tooting, old cars with horns that clowns use, what Harpo Marx used in all his movies. Bright sunlight falling on a green tablecloth—a card game. Face cards were fanned across the center of the table; with the ace of clubs on top. Lace-trimmed sleeves—tiny female hands taking up the cards, hands with fingernails like whittled rubies. The scent of roses and opened oranges.

“If you think
that,
Olivia, you're as big a fool as he is . . .” Laughter from the others. Olivia smiles (Pam knows it's
Olivia
), her teeth exposed then—crooked, discolored—

“If it's foolish to want a simple answer from a man, then—”
Up, away—a sudden shift . . .

. . . the sun is in her eyes, she is on a train; light flickering now as the train passes through dappled shadow, a landscape of hedgerows and fields of grain, a listing shed spilling hay, a forlorn swaybacked horse near a fence. The rhythmic clatter of wheels over track seams. She is with. No. Inside a little girl, there in the thick of who she is. Pam can feel the tight knee-socks pinching her shins, her small legs dangling above the floor. She needs to urinate. She can smell sun-warmed cloth. It's the itchy wool fabric of the seats. A man in an overcoat is sitting across from her; he is smiling in her direction while holding a newspaper with one hand and stroking the skin under his chin with the other. She can see part of a headline:
MORRO CASTLE BURNS AT SEA:
134
LOSE THEIR
—He is her father—he is taking her to see her grandmother. The compartment door slides open and a uniformed man with a watch chain across his waistcoated chest steps into the compartment. The sound of the train is transmuted by his entrance, as if the cool air it allows into the confined space were affecting her sense of hearing . . .
a shift, a pull-up, then a sudden, wrenching convoluted transposition . . .

“Can a man be so inconsiderate that he would say such a thing at a time like that? I ask you—if he were
my
husband he wouldn't be for long!” There is laughter again. Olivia is dealing now—her small fat hands are white and puffy, blotched with pink. She plods through the process as if each card were something unique, new to her, of a differing shape and heft. Some of the cards seem to flip over as if by their own free will . . .

A calming cool breeze across her face—the face she can feel now, as if it were her own; she is in bright sunlight; she can see the tops of snow-capped mountains all around her—
level with her eyes, on equal terms with her point of view. The air is cold and her feet feel constricted; they are clamped into tight boots, she realizes. The sunlight is filtered through goggles; she sees everything through an orange, sunglass hue. She is skiing—springing and dipping into turns, her body doing things she has never been able to do before—cutting through the compliant snow. The horizon of mountains against the blue sky is like an edge of torn paper. She stops to catch her breath, turning her face into the sun, and is overwhelmed with the scent of sun-warmed lodgepole pine trees, suntan lotion; the taste of coconut and vanilla on her lips, again something to keep out the sun—gloves holding poles . . .

. . . shifting, spreading, the ether ripples and she is up and out of the skier, pulled by something way off to her left . . .
I was enjoying that, let me
. . . tumbling out and up, high, peak high, the skiers below, pencil dots on distant veins of white against the dirty green-black of the tree-covered mountainside . . .

“—the two-call thing, you know? Anyway she gives me her number and she's like ‘Call me, call me tomorrow'—shit, sometimes you should just shut your brain off. I'm thinking, wait a day, don't look too eager, be cool—too late, man. I call her. I call one more time, leave a message. Two calls, man—nothing.” They are out in front of a restaurant. Two young guys drinking coffee. One of them has his cap on backwards.

Pam knows exactly where she is, when it is—December of last year; a place in the Los Feliz part of LA, right off Number Five next to a pokey little golf course on the edge of Griffith Park: chairs and tables, red umbrellas out front—a place called
EATZ
—a hamburger place—great milk shakes, a pretty good Cobb salad. (This fact is rising from the one wearing the
cap like steam from hot soup). The traffic noise seems married to the sun's glare—a Volkswagen goes by with a Christmas tree tied to the roof, an X marking the butt end of the stump.

The other one is talking now: “I was beat up in a bar one time. They called an ambulance, they put me on the gurney and the guy says this ride to the hospital's going to cost you seventy-five bucks; so I started getting up and he's holding me down saying I shouldn't move or anything. Shit, I wasn't going to pay seventy-five bucks, I could drive my car over there, for Christ's sake.”

A skinny rake of a guy comes by pushing a shopping cart stacked above his head with flattened cardboard boxes; there's a rope around it to pull it so he can get far enough ahead of it to hold on to the wide load; he's easing it along the broken sidewalk, gently working it over the cracks. He scuttles around it like a hummingbird around hibiscus, husbanding it along. His payload, his take for the day. He's wearing flip-flops.

A woman in shorts and a halter top at another table is taking the glass of chocolate milk the waitress has brought over for her little boy and drinking the first inch so he won't spill it. She puts it in front of him and his face creases up as if the glass of chocolate milk were something else now, transformed into garbage already—he looks up at his mom and asks for a straw.

An older guy with a beard comes along walking a dog; it looks like a brown and white sheep dog. He ties the dog's leash to the wrought-iron railing that surrounds the eatery's outdoor area and comes around to sit at the table nearest the dog . . .

Back, back, and up out of there pulled back along a cor
ridor, a swirling tunnel of blue light, then pink, then yellow. The time line is shifting; she is falling through the ether toward something big, a gravity well of meaning, heavy with more meaning than she cares to comprehend . . .

There is blood and the afterglow of death, butchery—
everywhere
, the heat of the sun like a steam iron pressed against her face. The standing shock wave in the fixed noon heat. The sudden revving of engines, motorcycle exhaust. Cars with flags on them go by—Stars and Stripes, the presidential standard—flapping with ingenuous joy; a woman drops her roses and climbs out of the backseat of a dark blue convertible. Not out of the door but up over the backrest. The car is speeding up as she crawls on her hands and knees back onto the trunk. She is reaching for something—part of what has come undone . . .

“Pam? You okay? Come on, Pam. Hello?”

Pam's cheek was on top of her paper, the pen scrawls close to her eyes—her eyes were closed but she could see all the pages at once, overlapped like acetate animation cells. There was a splayed patch of drool under her mouth; it had blistered the paper and smudged the black marker ink into blue. It was a jagged-line drawing of the man with his arms straight out, legs apart—a skydiver pose. The head was smeared with dilute blue ink; flares of smudged spittle radiated from it as if the hair were on fire or he was bleeding and falling headfirst, the blood somehow ahead of him, vested with a new law of gravity, farther down the road he was traveling—ahead of him like a prophecy.

.
.
.
the Italian job

It was Larry who was really getting on his nerves now. Simon had taken a recreational spin back to the swinging sixties: London, January 29, 1967, at the Saville Theatre in Soho. Jimi Hendrix battling with the Who. Strictly a viewing session, this time. Ten minutes of it hanging over the audience, soaking it up. The sound was bad, the amps breaking into a staccato hum, Hendrix not as amazing as he'd expected. The crowd looking like a bunch of scarecrows—but it was an Historic Event, supposedly. Simon came out of it with his ears ringing, not the internal ringing he was plagued with now and then,
but the real thing—inner-ear damage, as if he'd been there in the flesh.

Larry came right up to him the next day and said he'd been watching him. Smiling like it was a big fucking joke. “Videotape of rock music; your signature on it,” he said. “Blenheim thinks it's my fault.” He looked like a newspaper-whipped puppy for a second. “My mind wandering, I guess—but you know? I was
focused.
I was really
focused
this time. On a nuclear plant or something, a chemicals plant maybe, somewhere in Syria or Tibet—someplace like that.”

“A rock concert, huh? Was I with a chick? Was I having fun or was I striking out?” Simon turned away and opened his
Wall Street Journal.

Blenheim took him aside later that day and told him pretty well what Larry had said about his “signature” showing up on Larry's monitors—with a bit more technical jargon thrown in to make his own dick feel bigger, Simon figured. He led him into his office and did the power body language thing: he directed Simon to a low soft couch, then perched himself on the edge of his desk so that Simon had to look up when he spoke to him. Transparent shit, but it probably had some effect anyway. The guy's “Old Man River” voice didn't help much either.

What put Simon at a real disadvantage was the fact that it tailgated a session where he'd actually tried his best to get results. It had not gone well; looking back on it he wondered how it could have gone worse, really.

It had been a session with a set of coordinates that weren't really coordinates—just a name and a rough indication of where the target person would be: southern Italy near Naples. A hostage taking of some kind, a bunch of Veneto sep
aratists behind it supposedly—that's all Blenheim would tell him, high-priority stuff coming in over a secured fax line from some cloak-and-dagger organization—the Pentagon, or NSA; the CIA, maybe.

“Just tell us where he is,” Susan had said. Susan, the techie with the face that seemed perfect in a bland sort of way, an attractively ideal face—the offspring of a suburban
cheerleader
/quarterback high-school-sweethearts-who-
actually
-got-
married-
and-had-kids kind of genetic coupling. Pleasantly attractive, but nothing to lose weight over.

It took him about ten minutes to fall into the ganzfeld trance—Susan's fingers rougher with the goggles than Jane's—and slowly tumble his way over to Italy. And another few minutes to realize it wasn't working; the coordinates were garbled. It was like losing vertical in the middle of a dive.

It felt as if he were being pulled back out of the ether with a huge hand grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and suddenly straight-arming him back into his body, down into the recliner. The man he was looking for was out of reach all of a sudden—the contact broken, cut off. Even the sense of the guy, his location, none of it was coming through.

Simon came out of it somewhat humbled by the experience, with nothing but a stray dreamlike image: a monk surrounded by animals—Saint Francis, for some reason, a painting (it had to be; it had no movement to it) of Saint Francis of Assisi—a man feeding a dog, birds on his shoulders, some swooping down around his head, one perched, one on his wrist pecking at the food in his hand—the food for the dog was being plucked from his fingers. That and the view of a mountain range, cypress trees nestled between distant hills, a deep turquoise sky.

He opened his eyes, sat up, and asked for a piece of paper and a pencil. He started sketching and what came out of it was a series of arches: a big one flanked by two smaller ones, with the image of Saint Francis in the larger center section. “He's near this painting, or he's looking at it a lot. I don't know, he could have been looking at it when they got him. The time sequence of things isn't too clear. And there's a lot of smoke where he is. He's having trouble breathing.”

“A triptych.”

“What?”

“A triptych. It sounds like you're talking about a triptych, a painting in three sections. Saint Francis, you say. Hold on, I'll get back to you.”

She was back in less than a minute, handing Simon a bottle of water, preparing him for something. Blenheim came in right behind her; the way he looked at her made Simon think of someone at a Burger King drive-through. “It's all over,” he said. “They found him; he's dead.”

Simon twisted off the cap and took a drink without saying anything. He got out of the recliner and signed Susan's
clipboard
—something they all had to do after a session, for some reason. It seemed pretty pretentious to Simon. Like bimbo anchorpersons on the five-o'clock news scribbling something on the pages of the copy in front of them; as if the latest mugging report or the mandatory upbeat tag story about the World's Largest Enchilada was something so important that even its telling had to go down in history.

And then the shakedown in Blenheim's office. Right after the wonderful news about the foreign diplomat or whoever he was ending up dead in spite of Simon's little dissertation about Saint Francis of Assisi.

Blenheim folding his arms and looking into his eyes as if Simon were a kid who'd been caught stealing apples. The “Unauthorized Remote Viewing” lecture. The one about poor old Ron Koch, whoever he was—no one remembered the guy—the “implosion” factor. The stuff on Larry's tapes. Warning him, “Any more tricks like that . . .” He raised his big blunt linebacker hand, the middle finger bent to one side so that it looked like he was doing a laid-back version of Mr. Spock's famous salute. The threat left hanging in the silence between them. “I'm not going to ask for an explanation. I don't care why you're doing it,
have
done it. Just don't let it happen again.”

No mention of Gordon, thank God. So it had worked; no one pointing a finger at the big ugly hole floating around out there where Gordon used to be. He had gotten away with it; the perfect murder. Asshole with a capital “O.”

He walked out of the office and along the corridor to the front door thinking, this is never going to end, is it? First
Gordon
, now Larry—Larry was turning into a pain in the ass Mr. 7-Eleven-Video-Surveillance-Camera. Obstacles in his way—all of them really, not just Larry. Anita was giving him the odd look every now and then; as if he smelled like rotting meat. Maybe she was picking up on all the stuff he was doing too. The ghost of Gordon Quarendon or some such shit visiting her in the middle of the night—telling her about his Studebaker and his cat, the number of lives it had used up already.

He could always just leave, he supposed; but he didn't want to—he was having too much fun watching history change right before his eyes. And the treasure waiting for him out in the New Mexico desert could do just that—wait. The three
bags of gold were more like a nest egg in his mind now—his pension fund. What with his bank account here in St. Martin actually growing for a change. And for pocket money he would hit the casinos over in Philipsburg—and that big one in the Maho Beach Hotel.

Simon had discovered that he could read the cards as they were dealt—just touching the green felt was enough. It was like completing an electric circuit. He would let his hands rest on the rim of his glass or his stack of chips, then every so often just graze the table's surface with the tips of his fingers. It was like sparks going off in his brain: pretty kings and queens and an ugly four of clubs, the ace of spades like a Bantu god leaping into his head. He had it down to an art; he would let himself lose a hand or two every so often, just to keep the pit bosses at bay.

And he told himself there would be plenty more where that came from if he set his mind to it—more of all kinds of stuff: fame, fortune, and beautiful lovers. Leaving your mark on the world—wasn't that what it was all about? Some rock dude had said something like that once. The chicks/bucks/
celebrity
continuum. The Happiness Quotient. All he had to do now was clear away a few obstacles.

Later in his room Simon lay on his bed and thought about what he had to do next: a little bit of extracurricular out-of-body in the here-and-now. It was going to be like a stroll in the park; he wouldn't even need coordinates for this one.
Simon
could just leap out of his body and feel his way to the target. No corporeal manifestation, not unless he had to. A stroll down the hall, more like it. To Jane's office.

Data was notoriously hard to remote view, especially verbal
data supposedly; it was hard to process, the wrong half of the brain doing all the work—negotiating the ether was like jazz improv, rather than algebra. Which was interesting because he hadn't had any trouble with the photos on the roll of film that first time out—Jane's little OBE entrance exam with the steel chest in the attic. That picture of the origami crane made out of newspaper: he sensed he could have unfolded the page in his mind and read the whole thing if he'd been so inclined. And that time he'd remote viewed Peter Abbott's file on the desk in front of Jane had been a snap.

If it didn't work that way with file folders packed into a filing cabinet (he assumed that's where he'd find the stuff; he couldn't imagine an outfit like Calliope relying on computer data alone) he was prepared to do a physical jump, actually touch down in the office—drink the three glasses of water he needed for a CM; dehydration seemed to be an issue, he'd come to realize. The headaches and the ringing in his ears were connected to simply that: electrolyte depletion.

If he was going to do away with Larry and the rest of the inmates here at Calliope, he had to get the jumps right from here on in; his timing couldn't be off. He had to find their birth dates and work back from there. Conception being his only window of opportunity, morality-wise. He couldn't face doing in another baby. Way too messy.

Coitus interruptus
was the cleanest way to do it—a sort of a Catholic Divine Intervention. The Pope wagging his finger, shaking his head—the Angel of Unlife coming down out of the sky in a Reverse Annunciation dynamic.
Verily I say unto you .
.
.
the fruit of thy loins shall not ripen, the seed of thy main squeeze shall leap from its conduit unfettered yet perish
Onanesque on the barren wheat field of thy belly .
.
.
blah, blah, blah—whatever . . .

A deft little pinch to the scrotum, a knocked-over glass of flat champagne spoiling the moment—a strange apparition, maybe. Like something from
A Christmas Carol
—whatever it would take. A defective elevator, a missed phone call. His trick on his maiden voyage to see Mr. Manson had served him well—the hijacked car. Which reminded him—when he got back to the mainland he would park himself near a huge suburban Blockbuster Video and get a motel room with a VCR and a pile of Sharon Tate films; it would give him something to do between sessions of mucking with his fellow classmates here at Calliope High.

Sharon Tate and a bottle of Smirnoff's; and a half gallon of Tropicana's Season's Best Pure Orange Juice from Concentrate. That movie from the seventies: Robert Altman's
Nashville.
The Woody Allen thing, even that B-grade piece of soft porn S&M shit she did in the late eighties he'd discovered in her autobiography,
Roman Holiday: Polanski and Me,
playing Brigitte Nielson's mother, of all things.

Thank God he was younger than all the other psychics at Calliope. Even Pam with her grunge fixation was older than he was. The implosion factor minimized at least, unless he was somehow related to these people—his fate tangled in one of their life lines in some way. Like what must have been the case with Gordon. The turbulence that had thrown him off target.

Accurate birth dates. He didn't want to screw up like the last time. He would have to get it all from the Calliope files. Jane's files—dip into her ironclad little filing cabinet. Do a
Watergate. Power corrupts, and all that. Shit, why not? Go back to Sharon Tate's senior prom, show up in a '59 Chevy Impala—and watch her, just watch from the sidelines. Get her to look straight into his eyes for a second, maybe longer.

Peter Abbott came into his mind for some reason, like a dull ache in the groin. A flash of something—back or forward? Mr.
That's Entertainment.
A royal pain in the ass, that one. Dangerous. That knack he had of just holding on to something like an old shoe or a cookie jar—someone's kidney stones, maybe. For Peter it was like grabbing on to a towrope at the bottom of a ski hill. Psychometrics.

Peter Abbott. He was going right to the top of the list. His hit list.