A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (26 page)

Man finds gold; gold finds man.

For a while when Simon was about twelve or thirteen he had a paper route. He would get up early and head out on his bike through the long-shadowed, dew-laden air, along streets laundered of traffic to doorsteps and front porches he came to know like the shape of his own shoes. The bicycle his uncle had given him—an old fat-tired gearless clunker with a small front wheel to accommodate a huge wrought-iron carrier so massive and sturdy it must have been designed for newspapers or cardboard boxes full of groceries. It was from a past when men still did the work of boys.

The start of the route was always the most harrowing from a bike-riding point of view, the weight of his full load of papers turning the front wheel into a thing with a reptilian mind of its own; a willful, animated creature bent on pulling the bike off course—sometimes pulling him off the bike altogether.

Finding his way through the ether was like that now: a struggle against the massive pull of something brazen and unruly. It was like holding the handlebars of the heavens in his hands—a dowsing rod of cosmic proportions. In the midst of a session he could sometimes sense that pushing too hard in the direction he wanted to go would lead to something close to falling off his bike—but much more catastrophic. Much more final, fatal. Like falling against a sheet of plate glass.

He thought about the list of rules Jane had handed out the day Ron Koch had disappeared, and it occurred to him that the rules that count aren't made, they just are: they are a part of how the universe operates. The rule about getting close to your own ancestors; the one about not mucking with your own life line; how the universe will eat you up and spit you out if you try anything that could alter your own destiny. He felt sometimes, in his dives through the ether, how close he had come to brushing up against something rigid and abrasive. Unforgiving. Like hands at his throat.

“Touching down”—that's how he thought of it. For Simon a corporeal manifestation in the past was a tactile experience more than anything else: the cold rain, or warm air on the skin, the heft of himself pressing down on his shoes.

But he'd been nowhere near the tangle of roots that connected him to his own past—at least that was what he had presumed. His targets had all been earlier than his own conception date so there had been no chance of imploding like
Ron Koch; but not so much earlier that he would get caught in the web of his own heritage—uncles and great-uncles, cousins twice removed, third cousins of ex-husbands of an aunt's sister-in-law cropping up in the middle of a session parsecs away from his own life line.

He had tinkered with the past—toyed with it, massaged it. He liked to see it as fine-tuning the universe, but he realized now how complex a piece of machinery it was—how inscrutable. The whole number that was greater than the sum of its parts was beyond his comprehension.

Gordon, Larry, and now Anita—everything about them forgotten—
unremembered,
rather than forgotten. Deconstructed. But at the same time, everything about himself, the world he had grown up with, was somehow being altered as well. Sometimes he would come out of what he considered a simple RV session and feel so drained and enervated by the experience that he could barely muster the energy to take out his earplugs. He would spend a whole day in a chair staring at the TV. He would wake up some mornings convinced that his sense of humor was dying—there were no clear reference points anymore. A good joke needed something to push against.

There were no Nike shoes in this version of things, no Swatch watches. East Germany was still struggling along; Hewlett Packard was known as Packard Hewlett.
Heaven's Gate
had been a huge hit at the box office.

What really bothered him was that the newest version of things he had constructed all seemed natural and familiar—part of another overlapping stream of consciousness that had sluiced through his mind from the day he was born. He could ride a bike—he had learned to do it as a very small child.
A fact. A truth. Once you learn how you never forget. But another part of him couldn't, never had—had always been embarrassed that he couldn't.

He took a plane to Albuquerque, New Mexico, rented a Jeep Cherokee and at a hardware store on the way out of town bought a small shovel and a hatchet. All the way down I-25 to Las Cruces a voice inside his head—insistent, hectoring—his own voice from the cautious, rational side of his brain, kept pushing its way to the surface of his thoughts:
“.
.
.
the universe won't put up with shit like this. You start fucking with the past, it will crush you. It will fold you up into this, this .
.
.
packet of nothingness so fast, so tight, everything about you .
.
.
gone, forgotten. Like you were never born. Let go of it, accept the world you've made for yourself and live with it.”

He passed an exit for a place called Truth or Consequences and he wondered whether he was making it all up as he went along now. One nightmare piled on top of another.
“It will crush you, my friend, eliminate the irritant. And that is you—a fucking grain of sand up its ass.”

The three bags of gold were under the rubble at the base of the old mission wall—right where he'd expected them to be. (There were still some constants in the universe, thank God. Some kind of cosmic gold standard at work maybe.) Treasure trove. The small leather sacks were heavier than he'd imagined anything that size could be. The leather was brittle, like old cardboard. One of them tore open as he placed it in the back of the Jeep.
A grain of sand up its ass
—the voice again. Simon gathered up the spilled nuggets and stashed them in the plastic bag from the hardware store. He fished a few out and brought them to his lips; for a second his tongue tasted the real thing. Not fool's gold, this was honest-to-goodness
gold. Tasteless. As real as it could get. As real as he could make it.

The next day Simon got down to business; he did some digging over the phone and found out where he could put his hands on the maps he needed—maps that were produced every day. They were archived at the National Weather Records Center in Asheville, North Carolina. It was all there, supposedly. Years of daily temperature and wind speed readings, huge three-foot-by-four-foot maps—“surface charts,” the nice woman on the end of the line had called them—all reduced to tiny bite-sized spring rolls of data-laden microfilm.

Weather maps—it seemed so obvious now that he had thought of it. Hindsight like a dog eating its own tail—the time line entropy thing. Potential into kinetic; hindsight being the best of both worlds: seeing how milk got spilt and not having to cry over it.

His plan was to dowse the weather map records the way Gordon Quarendon had shown him, scan them back through time till he came up with Peter Abbott's birth date and birthplace. Use his St. Christopher medal the way Gordon had used his old car key.

He wouldn't have to go to Asheville physically; he could remote view the archive in real time, get it done a lot faster that way—like Luscious Jane's little test the first week he was at Calliope: sticking his remote head in that metal box up in the attic to find out what was on the roll of 35mm film.

The only complication would be the dowsing trick; he wasn't sure if it was possible to do it remotely—with an ethereal rendition of a medal that was still round the neck of his real body back on the hotel bed.

Peter Abbott was the prime target of course, but there was also Polythene Pam to deal with too. And he knew her birth date already, from his scan of the files in Jane's office. February 24, 1968—three years older than he was; about five years younger than Peter. A twelve-year-old with tits, as far as he was concerned, but the important thing was that like all the others she predated him birth-wise. No chance of doing a Ron Koch.

His first impulse was to leave her till the end, get Peter out of the way first. But he wanted to get the gusto back into this game—it was turning into something like a job at minimum wage—what happened to Good Day Sunshine? Being bad wasn't any fun if no one knew how bad you were.

Doing Peter in first would be like making love to a woman passed out on the floor. The guy wouldn't know what hit him; what he was missing. He wanted to make a game out of it, watch the guy squirm. Get a little taste of
schadenfreude,
then later on, a whole meal of putting the guy out of his misery. Peter wouldn't be able to forget her—that was the beauty of it. He would remember what he'd had and what he'd lost and no one would be there to help him get over it—no one would care. Everyone would think he was crazy.

He suddenly realized how much he hated the guy. The way Peter had kept his mouth shut that time when he'd pulled the plastic ring out of old Thornquist's little gray box—just sat there with his eyes fixed on him, passing judgment, that was it. All these hotshot wannabe baby boomers passing judgment.

.
.
.
raw data like a Beaujolais

Simon had all the money he needed—for now. The gold had been much easier to dispose of than he'd ever imagined. People in the woodwork who didn't ask questions. Coming up into the murky flicker of his rented-by-the-hour Internet access point; going back down again with the goods. The proverbial blind eye about reporting it all to the Feds. Anything could be bought—and sold it seemed.

He opened a bank account, and headed west. Riding his Wells Fargo card, showing hotel clerks and gas station jockeys this tasty old bubble gum card image of the stagecoach and
then just walking away with the stuff: gasoline, a new pair of Doc Martins, nice rooms with little bottles of shampoo and hot chocolate chip cookies sometimes, handed to you when you checked in as if you were a little kid and were being rewarded for doing something exceptional—winning a spelling bee. Money never changed hands really—just a smile and a moment of silence while the ticking little box beside the phone blessed the transaction with a wafer of paper.

It was a constant everywhere it seemed—the
computer
-driven, money-lubricated spend game. His adjustments hadn't affected any of it. Or he was developing some sort of time-line-tinkering Alzheimer's, and it all just felt right because he couldn't remember it being any different.

He spent a few days working his way through Arizona, stopping at the Grand Canyon, just for form's sake, then on into California. He avoided LA and headed straight up the I-5 and cut over from Sacramento to the Napa Valley to spend a few bucks on the local wine.

He met a girl in a bakery in Sonoma of all places who thought having lived in Vancouver was something special; she had a ring through her nose, wore clothes made in third world countries by children, and used the word “cool” the way his mother used “nice.” He paid for his multigrain chicken and fried onion sandwich and said good-bye (“It's been a blast . . . etc.”) and ate it on a bench in the town square. Under a flagpole with a bear flag on it—the first flag of California, supposedly, the plaque at the base of it said. That sounded odd to him, and he wondered again whether it was one of the side effects of his tinkering; or something he hadn't come across before and would have been new to him even if he hadn't made any changes at all.

He pondered this conundrum for a while—the fact that he could never be sure one way or the other. He watched the tourists circle the square in their four-by-fours, the young moms with the strollers that looked like mountain bikes, then got in his rented car and headed out of town.

The girl—he could have taken it further, he knew that; parlayed it into an evening of debauched distraction if he'd wanted to. But he didn't have the energy for it; or maybe he'd been spoiled at Calliope—the Jane thing. It surprised him how indelible a mark she had made on his internal dream-girl web site, if you could call it that (the lust links in his stream of consciousness kept bringing him back there again and again)—the Jungian shrine to the
anima
in all of us.

He headed west aiming for Lake Tahoe but didn't quite make it; he was overcome with a weariness he put down to the chicken sandwich or the Napa Merlot mixed with the Sonoma Zinfandel and decided to stop for the night outside Reno.

When he got to Lake Tahoe, he circled the lake for the day and ended up at a half-decent place right at the base of the ski hill. A hotel with a lobby and valet parking and a ski shop right across from the front desk. Not that there was much snow out there yet, except what he could see topping the distant peaks on the other side of the lake—it just felt good knowing the mountain was there if he wanted to take the gondola to the top and pretend he was back in Vancouver.

He stayed in his room and watched TV for a day or so, trying to get rid of the headache he seemed to wake up every morning with these days. TV and the occasional movie—the Sharon Tate thing again, even though she was dead again in one part of his bundled memory . . . wasn't she? (A car acci
dent or something like that?) He tracked down the revised version of
Nashville
at a video store near the casinos on the Nevada side of town. And one of the movies from her comeback phase:
To Die For.
She had a bit part as the mother of the Nicole Kidman character and she played it with a Joan Collins shrillness to her voice that put him off. Better to stick with
Valley of the Dolls
from here on in, he decided—and that one with Dean Martin,
The Wrecking Crew.

He took the casino shuttle to Harrah's one night and put up with the cigarette smoke and the time share harassment to make a few bucks at the blackjack table. He stuck at it for about twenty minutes, working his way up to hundred-dollar bets before giving in to common sense and letting the dealer win some of it back. The pit boss wandered over and stood there like a bouncer for a while but Simon just looked him straight in the eye and smiled.

When he figured he'd made enough for one night, he slipped off his stool, fed a few ten-dollar chips to the
poker
-faced dealer with the disfigured bow tie, stuffed the rest in his pockets, and headed for the cashier.

His heart was racing as he walked through the crowds to the escalator. He was scared of these people: the pit boss and all the heavy brows on the other ends of the surveillance cameras; he could feel them watching him. The back of his head was on fire with it. So much for the good life. There must be easier ways to make a buck, he told himself.

There was snow falling where he found Pam the first time—he was there just to watch, he told himself.
I like to watch.
He'd decided to take the passive armchair approach, fall into
a low-stress RV mode and glide on down to the surface of things and drift with the ticking of the clock for a while: just being there was enough for now.

A little girl in a nylon snowsuit—cherry-pink. Her breath like a wand of mist—a winter magic trick. The expanse of snow in the flat afternoon light was an erasure of where she wasn't.

He had zeroed in on a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, at least eight or nine years after her birth date (
FEBRUARY
24, 1968, it had said on the file in Jane's office). In a park near a small lake. Her brother was pretending not to care as his friend, a boy wearing a Boston Bruins wool hat and a sky-blue ski jacket, gathered up a powdery two-hand snowball and flung it in her direction.

Oh my God, what am I doing here? Another little kid. Shit, not like Gordon—Jesus, not another innocent child.
He couldn't deal with it—the knowing: better to fix in his mind the picture of the pain-in-the-ass, baffed-out, retro flower child with the sneering face that didn't bother hiding the fact that she'd rather go for a swim in a pool of pig shit than be in the same room with him. That kind of image—not this one: the cute little kid in nineteen seventy whatever growing up with a lifetime pass to Mary Tyler Moore World.

He came up for a breather, got off the bed, and made himself a drink—his tried-and-true concoction of vodka, orange juice, and a hit of Classic Coke. He propped the pillow behind his back and flicked on the TV. CNN full of Senate race blather; stuff about King Hussein's funeral (hadn't he died a few years back?); a little item about how eggs were good for people with chronic fatigue syndrome . . . He skimmed till he found an old movie starring Cary Grant and a woman he'd
never heard of—she looked like a cross between Jean Harlow and Kim Bassinger; he drew a blank and put it down to trivia overload—eight or more worlds of it, all mixed together like a Love Canal hazardous-waste cocktail.

He shut the thing off and made himself another drink; he went out for ice and the Muzak playing in the hallway was a Boston Pops version of “Penny Lane.” Thank God for the Beatles; he would never do anything to hurt the Beatles—not intentionally anyway. And if he did he would do all he could to undo it. John's latest stuff—even better than the White Album, in some ways.

It occurred to him then how much of who he was—who he
thought
he was—relied on the incidental bits and pieces of the world out there. He was eating into himself. Whenever he mucked with the past he came back into a world where there was less of himself than there was before. His mind full of a lot more data, but not much of it was information. Raw Data was like a Beaujolais. Wit, knowledge, wisdom—that was something else again. The good stuff had to age in the oak cask of his brain.

Back on the bed now, the urination thing out of the way, the dehydration thing—he wondered if the altitude up here in Lake Tahoe would affect anything: six thousand feet or something like that—the door locked, checked, the gas fireplace on so he wouldn't get chilled like last time—shoes off, belt loosened . . . show time. Bye bye Miss American Pie.

Simon listened to the purr of the fireplace fan and watched the blue numbers on the clock radio reconfigure their zigzag digital selves into lines and dots that told him it was 8:32
P.M.
He closed his eyes and started his descent—through the alpha
calm and then into a marginal realm of alertness that always reminded him of his childhood bout of delirium: the clarity of thought, the crispness of focus, and then up into ethereal floating—the transition into gentle buoyancy usually came with a subtle snap of release that seemed to cut him free of the moorings. His out-of-body self set free like an untethered dirigible.

Up and out of himself through the ceiling to the room above—a woman sat on the edge of the bed in a terry housecoat painting her toenails:
shit, he's so full of it; that way he has of telling everyone he meets every goddam thing there is to know about him. Jesus, who gives a shit .
.
.
God this stuff is a lot redder than I remember
—up through the cloud of her thoughts to the roof of the hotel—on past the rooftop tennis court. Across the valley and out over the lake; then back into himself, turning the sky inside out—from ultraviolet to infrared . . .

Down, down the line of things, back—tumble . . . double half pike back flip . . . here we go: Pam's mom and dad, May of 1967. St. Paul, Minnesota. Just before the Summer of Love. It would be another year before the myth would make it to the top of the charts. All that stuff about Haight-Ashbury and putting posies in your hair.

Bell-bottoms hadn't been invented yet—not as far as the kids were concerned, and guys with shoulder-length hair were something you only saw on Cronkite. “They're known as the Diggers—a group of young college kids living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco dedicated to the golden rule philosophy of—” or pop music shows like
Hullabaloo
and
Shindig
: Glen Campbell in a black turtleneck; Bobby Sherman trying to grow sideburns.

A parking lot outside a cartoon knockoff of a Swiss chalet—Hansel and Gretel with a bit of
The Sound of Music
thrown in, he thought. The marquee telling a different story—
MARIO'S FINE ITALIAN DINING.

“Kiss me.”

“Okay.” He put his hand behind her head and gave her a big kiss right on the lips.

“That was good,” she said, her bottom lip evaluating, her head nodding—playful distancing shit like she was pretending it didn't matter.

Dave Gilford shrugged and opened the door for her. The restaurant smelled of garlic and steamed pasta. As she went in ahead of him he could see a pink impression on the back of her neck where he'd pulled her head toward his. His own strength suddenly known to him. She had wanted some sort of assurance, he figured. That this wasn't the last time he would actually see her on a formal basis. The kiss like the seal of a notary public; something she could put away in a
safety
-deposit box. She turned and gave him a look that said they could bypass the dinner thing if he wanted. Get right down to business. A real Girl of the Sixties.

He said, “Let's just eat, okay?”

Sex was like dessert. “Afters,” as this English guy Dave used to work with called it. They'd be out in the field somewhere—he'd been a surveyor back then doing work on the interstate up near St. Cloud or some place in Wisconsin, he couldn't remember for sure—they'd end up in some greasy spoon for dinner and the waitress would come over to clear away what was left of their banquet burger specials and he'd say “What's for afters?” just to get her goat, so he could explain himself—
about “afters” being what English people called dessert—and get another thirty seconds of attention. Anyway, Dave always abided by that rule of thumb: sex was for “afters.”

The sign on the lectern just inside the door said “Please wait to be seated” written in fancy lettering. And they waited till a girl wearing a red checkered apron came over and led them into the back of the restaurant.

Little Miss Connie Wright with the nice ass, in front of him now heading for the table—tight short skirt and no bra, or one of those bras that made it look like there wasn't any bra, but he couldn't see any strap marks or anything through her sweater—just like all the hippie kids these days making a statement about so-called women's liberation. He was a sucker for nice tits—and hers were more than not half bad. Considering she was pushing thirty-five, maybe thirty-seven. Good tits looked you straight in the eye, whispered sweet nothings in your ear, sang in two-part harmony, like Steve and Eydie—that kind she had.

“I am not going in there begging for a deal just because he knew my father,” he was saying to her now, continuing something they had started in the car coming over.

“I'm not asking you to beg. I just want you to get the best price you can.”

“It's just a dining room table and six lousy chairs, for Christ's sake; you want furniture, there's a place over in Medina that's got better than anything he's got.”

“Not
that
table and chairs.”