A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (30 page)

There was another meeting about a week later around a conference table in a boardroom on the top floor of the building. With an urn of coffee this time, and a tray of pastry—muffins and cheese Danish. The launch date was two days away. In two days he'd be in Hamburg, Germany; on May 28, 1843, around five o'clock in the evening.

A blowup of the photograph Jeff had shown Peter was sitting on an easel at the head of the long table.

“All we want from you, Peter, is your image, basically.” Jeff turned around to face the others. “All Peter has to do is appear at the spot where the photograph was taken just long enough to leave his likeness on the photographic plate right between those two men on the left.” Jeff was speaking with that careful diplomatic precision Peter remembered from when he was a kid; it was the kind of voice his sixth-grade teacher used when the principal was sitting in the back of the classroom.

He was only there for show, Peter realized then, at a press conference of sorts, for an audience of one. Three other people were at the meeting: the technician who had been giving him his shots, one of the theory people, and a man in a dark business suit Peter had never seen before. “Graves,” his name was—one of PsiberTech's board members. He kept looking at his watch and when Jeff asked him if he had any questions he shook his head, smiled, and turned his whole body around to get a good look at Peter. He glanced at the photograph, then back at Peter as if he were trying to fit him into the picture here and now without the inconvenience and expense of actually going through with the experiment—as if there were some cost-effective shortcut no one had thought of that could
get Peter's likeness to suddenly appear in the space between the two figures in the photograph.

Peter started wearing gloves whenever he was out in a public place—thin cotton gloves he'd bought in a drugstore. Touching anything now triggered a cascade of images and voices, a dithering flux of babble and head-reeling images: the stone steps up to the old library building—sometimes he could feel echoes of all the people who had ever trodden them pass up through his shoes, his legs, and into the pit of his stomach.

The injections of the experimental drug were amplifying every aspect of his psychic ability. He could hear voices all the time now, the incessant chatter of people. And animals: the neighing, braying cacophony of creatures long dead. The long walks through the countryside with Jenny were a thing of the past. They were too emotionally draining. Each football on uncharted ground tripped a land mine of images and smells and snuffling grunts—the squeal of slaughter and the mewling, plangent yelp of the newborn.

He would buy a paper at a 7-Eleven and hear the drowsy thoughts of the clerk, his or her rage and anger at everything and nothing sometimes—he would see himself through the store clerk's eyes and wonder how the man (it was usually the men who glowed with hostility; the women seemed more at ease with themselves most of the time) could keep from lashing out.

Touching his hand as he made the change was even worse: he would get flashes of the guy's private life—a messy marriage full of unruly kids and bad debts. Or a wave of possible futures would roll through his mind: one after the other like cards on a Rolodex, or all at once like fanned-out playing
cards—images overlapping each other in a staccato rattle of variation. Like the sound of a fingernail along a comb.

Precognition—he'd never been very good at it before; maybe he wasn't now and he was just hallucinating.

So he bought a pair of gloves and stayed away from crowds; but even so, he was still overwhelmed with sensations and stray images. In some ways it was nostalgic. It was as if the drug had taken years off his life. It took him back to the early years of his childhood when the textures and smells and the palpable essence of his every waking moment would assault him, wrap around him like a swirling dust devil. He remembered the days (relived them in some ways) when his father would take him to the park in Cleveland and send him off into the crowd to play the “Go-find-your-mother” game. He caught flashes of certain women he had met back then—their smiles, the perfume they wore, the texture of their rough, warm overcoats and cool raincoats against his cheek.

Along with the voices and the heightened tactile
sensitivity
—if that weren't enough—the drug made him nauseous. About an hour after each shot he would find himself doubled over with stomach cramps—and the only thing he could keep down was fresh fruit. Citrus fruit mostly: oranges, grapefruit—the occasional banana.

When he held an orange in his bare hand the scent of the peel would take him by the scruff of the neck and drag him back to the beach in St. Martin; to the sound of the surf and Pam skipping ahead of him in her bare feet, then running back to him with the clump of orange peel in her hand, filling the air with its perfume as she reached up to touch his cheek.

And then he would be undone by sadness, and remorse. Why? The big question again:
Why me left behind and Pam and the others taken away?
Survivor's guilt they called it, didn't they? People who had endured Auschwitz or Belsen or Nagasaki—
I don't deserve to be the only one left.

His private detective had yet to come up with a trace of any of the other members of the original group of Calliope psychics. That in itself seemed relevant now—the absolute void of information. None of them had ever walked the earth—
except
for poor Gordon. He, at least, had left a trace of his existence behind: a small grave marker in a suburban Memphis cemetery. He had lasted six weeks. Something had done him in—or someone. The death certificate put the blame on “crib death.”

Peter knew it was Simon, but there was no way of proving it. He could go back and watch him do it—try and stop him if he could, re-edit the course of history—but he couldn't get back there without a “lodestone,” a psychometric link.

The death certificate itself might be useful. Or something that Gordon had been in contact with during his brief
lifetime
—his baby clothes or toys—but what was the point? There would be nothing to keep Simon from coming back over and over again, targeting Gordon at a different point in his short life—till he got the job done.

What he really should do was send his private detective on the trail of Simon Hayward. Track him down here and now, in real time. Go see him and confront him. And then what? Where would he go from there?

“Hang out with Germans,” Jeff said a few days after his first injection. “Go to a social club or something. Listen to Wag
ner, whatever—immerse yourself. The drug should help you with that, by the way—help you learn the language. You're going to need it.” He slapped him on the back and Peter came away with an image of Jeff naked on a large bed—naked except for a pair of black socks—and the smell of cigar smoke.

.
.
.
the “there” there is where it isn't—right where it ends at the edge of the ocean

Saint Christopher had brought him here—to Saint Augustine's mother: Santa Monica.

And curiosity, of course. He wanted to see what Peter's parents were like. Maybe meeting them would help him understand why he detested the guy so much. (Oh yeah. The conscience thing. Goofy with wings and a halo.)

Here the ocean was a boundary that promised boundlessness. The Santa Monica pier like a nerve ending. Probing.

Simon dove out of the ether (with a date and a specific place to aim for; RV stuff was as easy as saying “abracadabra”
now) . . . down through the bright blue sky into the heat and breeze of a California summer. To the beach just north of the pier at the foot of Colorado Avenue.

Teenagers baked in a pre-carcinoma sunshine. Ozone to spare here—our planet's natural sun block. Coconut oil deep-fried slick young thighs, Annette Funicello puppy-fat arms, into a hot dog mahogany. Beach towels, acres of them. Buttocks under checkered cotton. Breasts contained by the idea of John Glenn in his nose cone. Teased hair and sunglasses that did nothing but make you look like you were wearing sunglasses.

And portable transistor radios. Boxes the size of lunch buckets with “Ten Transistor” spelled out in metallic italic on fabric grill-work. The hits just keep on coming: Roy Orbison singing “Dream Baby,” then Neil Sedaka's multitracked whine: “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

Someone was actually swimming. She stood up above the roll of the sea and shook her hair back from her face. There she was. Peter's mom (soon-to-be-mom) stumbling knee high through the undertow back to shore. In a nice, ruby-red,
almost
-bikini, two-piece. Laughing and fending off indifference from the boy watching her. She was pretending to be unconscious of her new toy: a woman's body. The latest model.

Simon hovered, back behind the sunshine, invisibly visiting.

Santa Monica, California. July 15, 1962. He knew he had found his target. He could tune in and out of her thoughts about the guy if he wanted to—Peter's father; soon-to-be-
father
. The tanned kid with his dark hair slicked back like the car hop, Cookie, in that TV show
77 Sunset Strip.
A magnetic field of public lust was swinging them into a close elliptical orbit about each other. The parry and thrust—he didn't
have to be a mind reader to see what was happening. Where it was heading: first base and beyond.

It occurred to Simon that Sharon Tate would be nineteen right about this time. Just like little “Gidgit Gets Laid” over there. The hair the same, he noticed then, as she tipped her head to one side, drying it like the sign language gesture for going to sleep—two hands praying beside the head. Patting it down to bring it back to the natural blond. She was blond like Sharon Tate, the woman whose life he had saved. His Charlie's Angel. No one knew that of course—which suddenly seemed all wrong.
I want to be remembered for something—saving her life would be a start: “Simon Hayward—the man who saved Sharon Tate's life.”

The lips not the same, though. Thinner; and the nose was slightly larger, more Streisandesque than he liked, but passable. Nice body too—if you took into account how out of shape chicks were back in the sixties, their asses hanging down to match the cheekless girdle line in all those idealized Vargus pinup girls. Girdles were still the thing back then, he remembered, along with crinolines and bullet-nosed, poke-your-eye-out bras. Even in the early sixties. (It was ostensibly the fifties: anything pre-Beatles was still the fifties as far as he was concerned.)

The Beach Boys in the air now: “Surfin' Safari.”

The guy with the slicked-back hair picked up the radio from beside the purse of Pete's mom-to-be's best, “Plain-Jane” friend. (She was a little chunky and hadn't crossed over into the universe of the two-piece yet.) She looked up from her magazine, took off her sunglasses, and yelled something as Pete's dad-to-be danced his way off toward the pier.

He was taking possession of the song; his long toes were
in the sand now, shuffling, digging in as he did the bobbing, bird head mating-dance thing with his arms out, faking the “Swim” or “Watusi” or whatever it was—his tongue coming out over the bottom lip to show he was really concentrating, but letting them know it was tongue in cheek—a parody, and if he wanted to, in the right circumstances with really neat clothes on, not just his tight satin Jantzen “Nylastic” swimsuit, he could dance up a storm.

Peter's mother dropped her towel and followed him, the guy with her friend's brand-new portable transistor radio.
He can't just take Tina's radio like that—what a character. Who does he think he is?

He worked his way through islands of towels and red metal Coca-Cola coolers, clusters of itsy-bitsy pink and pastel yellow and polka dot; and tiny kids spidering across the sand to the water—through all that toward the pier, the music still with him, as if it were his own personal soundtrack.

Peter's father ran a few steps, then stopped to see if he was getting away with it. He waited until he was sure she was following him, then did a slow, makeshift traveling dance across the sand to the beat of the music. He was yelling out the words to the song in spite of the looks he was getting from everyone around him. (An old man sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper told him to shut up.) He looked back over his shoulder and when he was sure she was watching him he waved.

It was a wave that resembled a salute—a signal, a sign that says,
“This is just a game—play along for a bit. What the hell. What have you got to lose?”
—that kind of wave. He was almost there, at the pier, where the road ends and the boardwalk begins; where the steps led up to the hot dog stands
and the carousel with its corny old calliope. He wanted to show her the inside of the ballroom, the La Monica. His older brother worked there and if he was around he could get them in even though the place wasn't open yet—not till around suppertime. But he changed his mind at the last minute and darted back toward the water instead, back into the shadow of the pier itself. Out of the sunlight.

Simon pulled up and away, back into the ether thinking,
This game is getting more and more interesting all the time.

An uncle too; the whole fucking family all in one place . . .

Danke, meine Herren. Vielen Dank

There was a caramel-sweet beauty to the sensation, underlaid with a twinge of dread—way down there in Peter's innermost innards, the itch of suspicion that he would never get back to his body—his home body—that the body he was manifesting in the past would evict the old one or build a cage around it, far away from the places it frequented, the times it lived in, and never let it get back home again—out of spite, jealousy: the rivalry of siblings.

The sweetness came with the realization—the other side of
the coin—that he could float like this forever and he would never have to go back there if he didn't want to.

This all passed through Peter's mind as he suddenly saw himself looking back over his shoulder. But at the same time this image was superimposed with the sight of himself lying on the waterbed in the PsiberTech lab looking up at his departing other self—his astral body peeling away from the physical one like a Silly Putty impression.
Never like this before; never so visceral,
he thought—it was more than a trick of the mind now. His body, laden with muscle memory, was in on it too: a co-conspirator.

There was a scratching, subsonic rasp on the bones of his inner ear; words in his head were fighting, elbowing for the spotlight. A breathy murmur was coming from somewhere near his left eye; it constricted into a high-pitched yelp, then ballooned into a basso grumble that retreated into a background babble of random chatter—like the voices of his early childhood, comfortingly nostalgic and terrifying all at once.

Peter drifted through the ether in a breeze of color; but the color was flat against the plane of his vision. Two-dimensional, like a skin of swirled paint; organic, fluxing, but flat. Meat cooking: the smell of it like Sunday dinner at his grandmother's, the burned-fat smokiness caught in his throat. The backs of his hands felt numb, chilled by the wind. The tight, upturned collar of his mock-nineteenth-century shirt girdled his neck. He pushed forward through the membrane into voluminous white; a dense liquid milk of glare. The little elfin creatures Jeff had warned him about swarmed around him for a moment or two—pale, slithery presences; fleeting smiles
without faces; eyes body-languaging the meaning of words whispered into his head—then gone.

He was holding on to an old jar of antique brown glass filmed with milky dust; it had a cork stopper and a red-
bordered
label bearing a handwritten chemical name: “Sodium thiosulfate.”

It was the lodestone of his voyage into the past, the kite string of his flight through the ether—it held him back and lifted him up all at once—and he could feel it now, tugging at his hand like a nibble on the end of a fishing line.
I am here and not here—both.
Another paradox—you see one, you've seen them all.

The unearthly wind swirled him into a tumble now, a ricocheting somersault through the crags and outcroppings of a turbulent ether. It was a time-sundered, space-addled journey to his target: Hamburg. May 28, 1843.

He was aiming for the scrub and meadow that bordered a forest outside the city proper, a place for picnics and relaxing strolls through the countryside. The bottle would take him there, they said; and the drug. (His last injection before liftoff had been a “booster shot.”) Not just his eyes and ears this time, but all of him, in the flesh. Along with the tight shoes, the velvet jacket, the high-collared shirt and cravat, the trousers with the button fly. More than a dress rehearsal, though. Opening night.

Corporeal manifestation in the past.

Jeff called it “touchdown,” as if it were some little boys' game of “Dare” and “Double Dare.” Going to the moon or Mars, dropping a bomb on Hiroshima—macho shit Peter had never felt qualified to indulge in. Acting the part was something else again.
Dress me up, give me the script, and you can put me anywhere. Make me do anything . . .

He would be taking the psychometric link with him this time, they had explained—like his clothes, within the cocoon of his Self, wrapped in the “penumbra on his aura,” he'd read in one of Jeff's memos—even as it led him to the target. Another paradox he didn't have the energy to grapple with.

There was a swiftness to the transition from ether to destination he had never experienced before—probably because of the nature of his transformation from ghostly presence to flesh-and-blood—the sudden onrush of gravity; a tightness and immediacy of smell and temperature; the warmth of the sun on his cheek; the rosy flickering play of leaves and branches through his closed eyelids—the sound of a barking dog off in the distance. He was lying facedown on the ground, he realized then—solid, married to the substance of it—earth.
Here and now. “Touchdown.” Show time.

He panicked with the sudden realization that he was really here in the past and not back there—forward there?—on the slough of a coffin couch in the PsiberTech lab. Or was he? Two places, two times at once. The body replicated here, or transported? His mind was here at least—or was that a replica too?

He opened his eyes: dead leaves, dark soil, the familiar smell of forest floor. Grass tickled his ear. The bottle was still in his hands and he let go of it and got to his feet. His tight britches pulled at his groin. The collar cut into his neck. He took a deep breath and felt a burning in his chest.
What a newborn must feel,
he thought. Oxygen he had no business conspiring with was in his blood now.

He took a small mirror out of his waistcoat pocket. He straightened his foulard tie and brushed at his shoulder—everything else was in place. They had let him loose in a
theatrical supply store and he'd taken pains to give himself a convincing period mustache; and he'd added a little gray to his hair . . . Peter Abbott in the flesh—here and now. He touched his cheek—skin to skin but oddly out of phase with itself, like a soundtrack out of sync.

Peter took a step forward out of the underbrush, over a tangle of roots toward the brightness of a clearing. He could feel his own body here in this place, in this time, displacing the air, compressing the earth beneath his feet, but his body lurched through space as if he were fighting an errant center of gravity and pushing against more than the air—
the weight of the future is on your shoulders.
A function of being so far back in time, he figured. The inverted family tree: the countless ancestors he could be interfering with.

Peter found himself in an open meadow, in full sunshine. In the distance he could see the spire of a church. He was facing away from a wooded hillside, and from where he was standing, he had a clear view of the river valley below. He could make out what must have been the city center with its dockyards and clutter of city streets; some of them were lined with what looked like new construction. The smoke from distant stacks merged into a leaden line above the far horizon—Hamburg in 1843, just after the Great Fire of 1842. He had been briefed by Jeff's assistant with a cursory “back story” that crammed a hundred years of war-torn history into a few sentences.

He heard something—voices, from somewhere behind him—not in his head this time, but as real as if he were back in Iowa on the grounds of PsiberTech. He turned around to see a group of men assembled in the shade of a large oak tree and he sensed right away that they were members of the
Hamburg Art Club. Off to one side another man was attaching a large wooden box camera to a tripod. The photographer, Stelzner—it had to be. He finished what he was doing and hurried back to what looked like a small tent. As he drew closer Peter could make out the gist of what they were
saying
—all in German of course. It was the sparring bravado of men away from women—jibes and harmless jokes.

One of the group came toward him; he was wearing a top hat sitting back on his head. He had sunken cheeks and bloodshot eyes.
“Mein Herr, du bist spät. Kommen Sie hier, bitte.”
He walked with a slight stiffness in one leg.
“Wir machen eine Aufname. Schnell, schnell
. .
.”
Peter was visible, tangible to others as well as himself, he realized then—the solidity of his presence was no illusion.

Why the man before him assumed he belonged in the photograph, he did not know. Seeing his well-worn trousers and wrinkled jacket, Peter felt conspicuous in the stiffness of his neatly pressed costume facsimile. At least he could understand what the man was saying; the foreign words rang with meaning, as if the thoughts behind the sound waves hitting his ears were falling simultaneously on the cells of his brain.

“
Willkommen.
You must be Bremner, the writer; am I correct? You have the hands of a writer.” The man smiled and his bloodshot eyes glazed over. Peter wasn't sure what could have marked them as writer's hands—ink stains maybe, here in this pre-computer age. But his hands were clean. Maybe that was it. The shape of his fingers? Maybe the guy was versed in some offshoot of phrenology or palmistry. And who was this “Bremner”? He had been prepared to create an excuse for his unheralded appearance among them—even sneak out of
the bushes and crash the photo shoot if he had to—but this was too easy. He wondered what had happened to the real Bremner.

“
Können Sie sich bitte beeilen?
Come, come. Hurry. Carl is anxious about the light.” He touched Peter's arm and for a fraction of a second the sky above seemed to roll into itself and shimmy through an iridescent somersault as the blue of it retreated into yellow-green, then red, then slid quickly back to blue again.
A tuning out,
he thought to himself. It was as if he'd tweaked the dial on an old radio. The man's voice Doppler shifted from German to English to German:
“.
.
.
Licht .
.
.
light .
.
.
Licht. He doesn't want to lose a second of it.”

Peter stood still and let the man go ahead of him; he tried closing his eyes for a moment but gave up on that when he found himself losing track of where his limbs were. He looked up and the sky was blue again, and clear except for a few clouds—cumulus pillows drifting through mutations at a normal, relaxed pace, he was glad to see.

The photographer, Stelzner, came out of the tent with what must have been the unexposed plate. The club members took a few minutes to compose themselves in spite of the urgency; the late-afternoon sun slanted through the trees' ever-
lengthening
shadows while Stelzner fussed with the composition, arranging the assembled artists into a tableau that to Peter seemed a little too contrived. He placed Peter stage right of a man holding a sheet of paper (he could smell his cologne, and the slight odor of old beer in the fabric of his jacket). It was a musical score, a waltz, Peter figured from the little he saw of it. The man sitting in front of him was perusing a bound collection of large prints: views of churches and ruined abbeys.

Stelzner finally bade them hold the pose, then reaching with a delicate sleight of hand, he carefully removed the lens cap. He took out his pocket watch and held it up into the light, away from his own shadow.

It was a minute that could have been ten, it seemed to Peter. He was conscious of the lurching sway of his own heart as it ever so slightly pendulumed his trunk. He sensed that this was the essence of old photographs, what made them more than the sum of their parts: the time lapse of living things etching the daguerreotype plate with the blur of breathing and the minute twitches and reflexes of organic adjustments.

He remembered Jeff telling him that in the old spiritualist photos the ghostly invaders, the “phantasmal faces,” were called “extras.”
I am a leading man,
he thought,
or a swing who knows all the parts and is ready to fill in for the sick and lame. Poor old Bremner—whoever he is.
All this passed through his mind while the stopwatch and the elusive turn of the earth registered as the passage of time. Old time,
hundred
-and-
fifty
-year-old time. Time he had no business living through.

A cloud passed in front of the sun. Stelzner clucked and cocked his head as if he were listening to something in the distance; he scratched at his beard. No one spoke; no one moved. He put the watch back in his pocket and closed his eyes. He raised his arms; his open hands were poised as if he were conducting the tempo, the dance steps of the silver molecules. He snapped his fingers, then quickly recapped the lens.

Stelzner looked up at them all and smiled; he took a deep breath and said:
“Danke, meine Herren. Vielen Dank.”

They all clapped. Even Peter. It seemed right somehow. Stelzner bowed his head for a second—like the dip of the head that comes with the click of heels in bad movies about
Nazi Germany—then started fiddling with the back of the camera. Some cheered and slapped Stelzner's back—as if he had in fact gone to the moon and returned in his wooden box detailed with picturesque brass fittings—this was the age of Jules Verne after all, full of an energetic faith in the absolute fact of scientific progress.

In celebration, they all headed off to a tavern on the edge of the park—a shabby brick farmhouse, it looked like to Peter, with a line of hitching posts out front and a modest sign over the door. The only other detail that marked it as a public place was the mud-furrowed widening of the road and the litter of horse dung.

As he entered the inn he was overwhelmed with heavy, humid air—the acid bite of wood and cigar smoke; the stink of beer, cabbage, and humanity. A fellow club member, a short man wearing thick glasses and an oversized hat, handed him a glass before he had a chance to sit down: a pint of lager. He was directed through the hubbub of drinkers to a long table that had been reserved, it seemed, for the art club. There was a place set for him with a plate of bread and some sort of sausage. Slices of pale sausage with sauerkraut and potatoes.