A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (34 page)

Peter could see his ribs, how scrawny his chest was. He looked malnourished. There was a rash around one corner of his mouth.

“What are you up to, Peter? Give me a break—” He sniffed and blinked away dust as the wind threw up a swirl of litter. He coughed and said, “Do you think you can keep me here till Little Miss Gidgit gets it on with Daddy-O down there? Is that what you're trying to do? What's the point? I can stay here as long as I want. You can't. I give you maybe two more hours and you're doing a Ron Koch; you'll be in two places at once, two times at once. Implode City, man. Either way it's game over. I just have to weather this shit and you'll be gone.” He sat down on the bench and took a deep breath; his eyes were closed. “I can lie on the beach in the warm Santa Monica sunshine for the rest of my life, man—what little I've got left. Seven years till my own conception.” The sun came out then, as if he had willed it out of the pure blue sky—the way the sky should be, had been when Peter first got there. And he stood up then,
energized
somehow, by what he had said—the vision of it.

He had set it all in motion, Peter realized then. Set the stage for his own version of things. Peter felt the weight of the world, hundreds of worlds (worlds and futures that would never be), fall on his shoulders.

Simon looked at his watch, then farther down the pier toward the La Monica Ballroom. “Here he comes. Right on time.” A young man was walking toward them. He was wearing a sport jacket with an open shirt folded out over the collar. “That's your uncle, Pete. How would you like to meet him?”

Peter felt the world, the whole planet start to swing through his field of vision, the sea like the rim of a blue plate special, the breeze vortexing into a dust devil that spanned the girth of the earth . . . darkness and weight and lightness; and white searing light all at once. His family tree tendrilled around him, closing around his throat.

Peter lunged at him, but Simon was already out of reach; he'd climbed up onto the bench. Peter ended up on his knees. He was trapped; the guy down the pier was getting closer. Simon was doing a little soft-shoe dance and then the Swim, or whatever it was the guy on the beach, Peter's father, had done. His outstretched arms doing airplane wings in the steady breeze.

“This is a great time to be alive—the Kennedy era, man! Pre-Manson, pre-Vietnam . . . once you're out of the way I can hang out here and wait for the Beatles to come to town. I can play the stock market,” he said between moves. “Short sell November twenty-second, 1963. You know that date, man?” Peter shook his head; he could hardly stay on his feet. “Assassination day. Kennedy.” (He made a shooting noise, then blew across his gun-barrel index finger.) “Kaput. And, uh, that was the day old Aldous Huxley kicked the bucket too. He was high at the time, by the way—on LSD. And the Beatles. Their second album came out that day. Shit, you want to survive in this world, you've got to know your history or repeat it! Repeat, repeat, re
peat.
Hah! No pun intended,
man—” He started clapping his hands and singing something Peter couldn't make out.

“Come on—come and get me,” Simon said, suddenly climbing again: off the bench seat and up onto the back of it; another step and he was on the boardwalk railing itself.

He shot a glance at Peter to make sure he was watching and stood there with his heels hanging precariously over the edge; his arms windmilling for a second as he gained his balance. His tongue was out, pressed against his lower lip. He looked over his shoulder, down at the water, his face stretching with the effort—at the gray-brown undulating belly of it. Two, maybe four stories below him. Then back at Peter; he was windmilling again, but smiling now. He was managing to do a fair imitation of a tightrope walker. “I'm a diver, ten-meter tower, man—did I ever tell you that? Olympic material. Fuck, maybe it's time for me to come out of retirement.” His back was to the water. The heels of his dress shoes were hanging over the rail. “Come on, push me—get it out of your system.”

He's playing with me,
Peter thought.
Playing for time; he's not really in any danger.
He knew Simon could pull back into the ether in mid-flight if he needed to.

“
Pretend
you're doing something at least,” Simon was saying now. Peter's uncle was getting closer; it felt as if he were a black hole and Peter was a passing galaxy being torn apart. “Isn't that what you actors are good at? Faking it?”

For a moment Peter just stood there watching Simon play his little game. A performer more addicted to applause than Peter had ever been, or ever could be. This killer of memories and dreams, of people and places—the woman he loved. Pam.

He remembered then, what she had said that day in Iowa so long ago—so many versions of history ago—while the wind
peppered their faces with snow.
“Don't ever forget me, Peter. If you forget me, I don't exist.”

Simon swayed there in the breeze, playing his game of Catch-Me-If-You-Can. His face was altered by a sudden change of light. And Peter remembered the day Simon had ripped open Eli's tin box on the patio at Calliope headquarters in St. Martin. The way the light had transformed his face into a fragmented, cubist version of a human face; the calculated smudges of a Francis Bacon portrait. The sunlight broke through the clouds again and glanced off the gold of his medallion. Simon's St. Christopher medal: a pendulum of glinting gold swaying with Simon's balancing act.
Of course,
Peter thought. He remembered Simon's story about the last time he'd ever been near a ten-meter tower and it all fell into place.

Simon was still smiling as Peter climbed up on the bench and pushed him off-balance. He was playing out the scene the way Simon had written it—the scene of anger and futile desperation—but with a little bit of improvisation thrown in at the last moment.

In the split second Simon began to fall, Peter grabbed Simon's medal and tore it from his neck.

Simon is falling backwards into the rolling black water below the Santa Monica Pier. He pushes off the railing into a back two-and-a-half. He is thinking,
Just like the old days, except this time I don't have to worry about vertical; I can tumble out of here and up into the ether before I even get close to the water. I've got all the time in the . . .

Another tremor rattles the pier. The scene below—the darting children, a distant game of volleyball—flickers like a strobing slide show. The air is suddenly thick with the scent of
burning tires. The sky folds in on itself; the sun is a tennis ball bounced from a bedspread and the wind squeals through jagged spikes of churning sea. The horizon convulses and ripples into a smeared painting of ghostly flickering figures. They flap and stoop like stringless kites in the wrenching wind—Larry McEwan, Anita—and Gordon holding himself in his arms. All in that same instant . . .

Peter falls back onto the rough plank boardwalk. He has Simon's medal in his hand and for a moment it flickers and tickles his hands like the flutter of a captured glowworm. Peter falls right through the planking into the ether. (He holds the medallion in both hands now: it feels like a squirming snake.) He finds the ether calmer than when he left it. The random turmoil has subsided. There is a lucid precision to his flight. Forward now, along a strand as wide and clear as an open road. His lodestone, Simon's St. Christopher medal, can only take him forward, to a point in time well within the boundaries of his own life line. He knows he is risking
implosion
—Simon being much younger than he is—but there's no place else—time else—the medal can take him.
It doesn't matter. Let the universe walk me through this one. I have nothing, absolutely nothing to lose. Fold me up and throw me away if you want to.

He tumbles backwards, head-over-heels, it feels like, into a pillow of acceptance.
It is out of my hands my injured hands . . .
The medal chain is woven into the fabric of his skin, his time line . . . he rushes on, shunted forward through flashing light and white. Noise and chatter clamoring at the doors of his consciousness . . .
So I implode—so what. So be it .
.
.
So be it. Splashdown. Down. Down . . .

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

Peter's father-to-be is singing along with the song on the radio; he runs a few steps, then stops to see if he is getting away with it. He waits until he is sure she is following him; he does his slow, makeshift traveling dance across the sand to the beat of the music. He yells out the words to the song in spite of the looks he is getting from everyone around him. (An old man sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper tells him to shut up.) He turns back every so often and when he is sure she is watching him, he waves.

It's a wave that is something like 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 is almost there, at the pier, where the road ends and the boardwalk begins; where the steps lead up to the hot dog stands and the carousel with its corny old calliope. He wants to show her the inside of the ballroom, the La Monica. His older brother works there and if he's around he can get them in even though the place isn't open right now. But he changes his mind at the last minute. He darts back toward the water instead, back into the shadow of the pier itself. Out of the sunlight.

And she follows him—she has no choice . . . the Beach Boys are singing about surfing, about being young and not having a care in the world—“Surfin' Safari.”

A diving meet. The Junior Olympics: June of 1986.

Simon's mother was waiting for him to come out of the dressing room. “Here, Simon. I want you to have this.”
It was just before the last dive of the meet and his mother should have known better than to come back there—with all these people around. Treating him like a kid who needed his mommy. “This is to protect you on your journey through—life, I guess. St. Christopher. Do you like it? Put it on.” And just to get rid of her, he let her, even though he knew his coach wouldn't approve. She put it round his neck humming the National Anthem, for God's sake, like it was the fucking
real
Olympics or something. Jesus.

“Yeah, I do like it,” he said, thinking
It's the last dive, a back two-and-a-half, one of my best. I'm in first place—what the hell.

Simon's back is to the water.

On top of the ten-meter platform. Simon is ready to do a back two-and-a-half; he is poised on the balls of his feet, thinking through the song, the rhythm of it: “Blackbird.” His heels hang on the brink.

The scent of public pool chlorine. The ringing echo of splashing and the tinny clatter of voices against facets of concrete and steel. He hangs on the edge of the ten-meter platform and thinks about his dive—his fourth dive; he's done pretty good so far: a couple of sevens, an eight—the sequence of moves, the rhythm of the back two-and-a-half, the cadence and the pacing—a somersault, and then another somersault, then a kick up toward the platform. Look for the water . . . It was all gone in a flash. A hand out of nowhere strikes his chest; his medal bites into his sternum—and a face blinds him with words:
“Remember me, Simon.”
Peter reaches out of the ether.
“Don't ever forget this moment. Remember my name: ‘Peter Abbott.'
”
The medal in his hand is a smudged, flickering pa
limpsest of the one around Simon's neck. One and the same, paradoxed into duality. There is a searing flash of energy, a fusion—it's as if something has been discharged, grounded; as if each medal were a lightning rod for the other. This all happens in an instant: the spectators see nothing more than what appears to be a camera flash. “Remember
me. Remember
—” The liftoff, the spin is wrong. Oh shit.

The thud of bone on concrete astounds the spectators as only such a revelatory experience can—we are things as well as people—matter as matter-of-fact as a tossed cantaloupe. And a fatal blow sounds just as hollow: substantial and delicate all at once.

The pain is blunt and mild, the blackness more red than black. There is no sound below the surface, and in the few lucid moments left to him Simon feels that the swirling, mingling of spilled blood and chlorinated water is right; and that the raveling up of what could have been his life is comparatively unjust—but sacrosanct in a way his adolescent mind cannot fathom, here on the bottom of the pool. The paradox of it.

As his damaged body waits for buoyancy, he fades into a directionless tumble and breaks through the membrane, the meniscus to a side of his world that holds only what cannot be spoken of—for Simon is speechless. Lifeless. And ever shall be. No more jokes for Simon. No more anything.

Pam is preparing a dream, a dessert of a dream, folding ingredients into a whipped batter base—vanilla eyes, coconut skin. A waiter is standing, pacing, waiting for her to finish so he can serve it. He wants to know what to call it, what to put on the chalkboard out front. Today's special, a
Peter Pavlova
Pamcake
—a
Peter pamcake,
a
Peter Pan–cake;
her mouth is trying to get around the words. The waiter has a ponytail and he's wearing a tuxedo shirt and cummerbund—a little black bow tie. With a wooden spoon she is beating in a whipped cream of Peter's words, his voice like lemon juice, then syrup, then melted butter; his thick dark hair shavings of chocolate; the scent of him like saffron and Crayola crayons. The warmth of his chest against her cheek—
I can't eat this; it's too rich for me,
she is saying now, telling the waiter to take it away; his bow tie is expanding and turning like a propeller, slowly, so that the vanes pass in front of his face and brush his lips like a napkin. Each cycle moves things along like a slide show clicking to the next one . . .
this is from last summer: my brother in Rome in front of the Spanish Steps
(click)
.
.
.
this is me and Peter in that restaurant where the waiter kept telling me how much I looked like his cousin . . .
(click)
this is a bunch of us at Mullet Bay beach; that's Peter on the end . . .
(click)
and this is Peter having breakfast with Larry, Anita, and Gordon . . .
(click)