A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (4 page)

A small metal cylinder, like a short roll of quarters. He could see writing on the side of it, and a bulging raised seam running the length of it—a roll of film, 35mm. He could make out the Kodak logo now. Yes, definitely a roll of photographic film.

He pulled back out of the box. The line of sensation—a sheet of it cross-sectioning his brain—passed through his head and now his face; his lips were cold with it, chapped for an instant. And then he was floating back down through the ceiling again. He felt a shaft of dull ache as his knee grazed the electrical circuitry. It threw him into a spin. He was disoriented and tumbling blindly now . . . he fell back into his body. His own weight was like something new and impeding. A rosy glow filled his field of vision again, and Jane's peaches-and-cream voice, lip-close to his ear, was talking him down.

He felt her hand on his forehead then; her long fingernails were gently picking at the surgical tape holding the Ping-Pong halves to his eyes. Her breathing, the sense of her torso next to him, reminded him of a dentist chair intimacy, or the intimacy you share with a woman in a salon washing your hair. His knee ached and his mouth was dry, talcum-powder dry. “You did great, Pete. Really good,” she said next to his ear.

“What? What happened?” he said, swallowing. He kept his eyes closed for a moment and focused on the feel of the chair, the pressure of the footrest under his calves. The tips of his fingers tingled and the dull ache in his knee returned when he moved his leg.

“You tell me,” she said, handing him a glass of water when he finally sat up. Reading his mind.

He tried to, after draining his glass: “A roll of film, am I right? In the box?”

“I don't know. I'm not supposed to know. But that's good. You seem pretty sure about it.”

“I think I was right inside the box at one point. My head, everything passed right through it. At least that's what I thought was happening.” Peter eased himself out of the chair and filled his glass from the plastic bottle beside the monitor. “It was like I was really up there.” He winced and sat down again on the edge of the recliner. “Jesus, my leg still hurts, from when I went through the electric wire in the ceiling—I guess I
was
up there.”

“Only part of you was; your body was still down here, remember.” It was as if she were holding something back from him, some crucial piece of data. The way she turned away then and started fussing with things, the light over the chair and the pieces of tape she'd pulled from his face. He suddenly realized that he'd given something up, in the past minute or so—his reluctance to cooperate. He was intrigued by what had happened and he wanted to do it again, very soon. The pendulum had swung in their favor; he needed something from them now. Information, knowledge—and they were going to dole it out bit by bit.

“There was no chance of me
not
coming back, was there? Back into my body?”

That record by the Stones with the zipper on the cover . . .

Pamela Gilford grabbed the Hershey bar and headed to the back of the store, past the shelves of potato chips and taco chips, the dog food and detergent. She paused beside the wall-length cooler of soft drinks and juices only long enough to tear at the wrapper with her teeth and get some of the chocolate into her mouth before heading for the aisle with the cough medicine and toothpaste, for Tylenol and maybe some of those over-the-counter sleeping pills.

There. Much better: sugar and chocolate in her stomach now, in her blood soon, then the brain. Like falling in love,
the
Self
magazine article had said: chocolate does the same thing to the chemicals in the brain, the endorphins or whatever, as meeting the man of your dreams.

She needed the chocolate because she didn't want to think about what was in her bag—the letter from Calliope
Associates
—didn't want to worry it into more than it was. She reached inside one more time, feeling it between her fingers, her thumb and index only a spaghetti strand apart but in her mind the distance was incalculable, the letter fat with promise and something else. She kept seeing Fourth of July fireworks from when she was a kid: Roman candles in her backyard; the bucket of sand like an inedible birthday cake; the pungent smoke, and the glaring incandescent reds and greens of chemical fire. Her mother would never let her get close enough, and certainly not let her light any of them. That had always seemed crucial to Pam—the act of setting it all in motion.

They wanted to interview her for a job, the Calliope letter said, a job she hadn't applied for. It had to do with her psychic abilities. They had gotten her name from the psychic phone outfit she'd worked for a few months back. “Fortune 2000.”

She stuck the rest of the Hershey bar in her mouth and crouched down in the aisle to open her knapsack. Pam took the letter out and looked at the envelope again, at the return address: “Calliope Associates” in classy dark green type above a box number in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten, the Netherlands Antilles. An island somewhere in the Caribbean—she knew that much at least. They wanted her to phone a New York number and talk to someone about making all the arrangements. They were going to send her a plane ticket—all that
way just for a job interview. She put the letter back in her bag and headed for the front of the store.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said when she got to the cash register.

“Yeah?”

“You think I'm just going to walk right out of here without paying for it, right?”

“Eating it in the store is like shoplifting.”

“Not if you pay for it.”

“You're gonna pay for it?”

“Of
course
I'm going to pay for it. Jesus . . .”

Pamela took the bits of chocolate-bar wrapper out of her pocket and flattened them out on the counter beside the Tylenol and the sleeping pills. Especially the part with the bar code the kid needed to ring up on the till. No one knew the price of anything anymore, only when you've already bought it did they know the price.

He was taller than she was, but young. My God, she could see right
through
to how young he was . . . sixteen, almost seventeen, but big, muscular, on the wrestling team, a football player—he hated it, didn't like the coach, but his girlfriend, a little thing, five foot one, maybe—“Wendy,” or—No. “Cindy,” her name was—thought it was cool dating a guy on the . . . his birthday next week, she was going to give him a . . . Pamela stopped herself. He was talking to her again.

“Excuse me, ma'am—”

“What?”

“Six seventy-three? For your stuff?”

She gave him two fives and he rang it in. After really looking at her money for a second, as if she were still getting away
with something. A football player with a little gold stud in his earlobe. Macho macho man.

He handed her the change and when it touched her skin it was a line of hot oil running down her back.

That's not fair. That's not fair .
.
.
a little boy that looks like him .
.
.
not him, but his, years from now: his son .
.
.
beside the pool, a Day-Glo green plastic something, a ball, no, a truck, one of those freebies from Burger King, in the pool floating away from his hand. Little sticky fingers—there's chocolate on his fingers—reaching for it, the baby leaning too far over the edge: sky, blue, water .
.
.
she never should have touched the wrapper, the change he gave her tying it all together . . .

“Shit, I hate this. . . .” She turned for the door, her hand up to her mouth, the musk smell of spent chocolate as she bit into her thumbnail, biting down hard, getting a purchase on a nice crescent moon of it, hesitating at the end, letting the paring hang against her tongue for a second, like a tiny claw, before peeling it away and spitting it out. A cat claw. There. Out of sight, out of . . . she used her knapsack to bump open the door.

“Meow,” she said to herself. Out into the street into the traffic, “MEEOOW-RR. A drawn-out, Siamese-cat–in–heat meow. To blank it out, to parge the hull of her brain—the incessant bilge of voices.
I don't want to know. I don't want to know.
“MEOOW, RROEWW. MEEEOOW-RRRR.”

Kevin, the kid in the 7-Eleven, watched her leave the store, making these cat sounds, like a little kid: “Meoo
www,
meeoooww . . .” She swung her bag back over her shoulder, sending all her hair back with it. Big sweater, peasant skirt, sandals that looked like scraps of brown paper. Her knapsack
was stuffed with so much junk he wondered if she actually had a place to live.

She never bought anything usually, except lottery tickets—those scratch-and-win ones. The funny thing was, she'd take a while picking out what she wanted but then she'd just stick them in her bag and leave. Most people couldn't wait to see if they'd won something.

And she always had money: twenties, lots of fives. He wondered if she was a hooker; but shit, who would actually pay for some of that? When she'd dug out the two five-dollar bills he'd noticed her hands again—tiny claw fingers poking out of her sleeves. Little kid fingers—dirty, nails bitten down—how did she get her teeth around what was left? His girlfriend's nails were something she took pride in; Cindy's hands were like what you see on models. She came up to him in the hall at school sometimes, and just touched his arm for a second, with hands you see on commercials, every finger like a brand-new Corvette—different colors, metallic blue, purple, pink. Like something you would save up your money to buy.

She smelled good, though, the one that had just left the store—the cat lady. She looked dirty but she always smelled like soap, one of those health-food store soaps, the smell of the health-food store soap section. Cindy smelled good too, but more like fresh towels, shampoo—that kind of thing, but this crazy cat woman . . . she'd looked at him once, straight at him, not blinking, staring him down almost, the way his mother did sometimes, her eyelids droopy, and with her hair out of her face she looked not half bad. With a bit of work he could see himself, you know, actually getting interested in her.

Kevin looked down at the counter: the wrapper was still
there, bits of smeared chocolate and wrinkled paper, paid for but still in the store. For a second the feet of his mind scuffed at something about the idea of goods turning into garbage even before you actually bought them; but he stepped around the next bit, an insight that would bring it all down—his new Red Wing hiking boots; the picture of a jade-green Corvette he kept in his wallet. It was a struggle for him, the insight it would lead to; so he thought about Cindy again, her hands: the things they promised him, with that cream she used sometimes, what they told him about what he was finally going to get for his birthday next week.

Slain in the spirit . . .

Joyce Hayward wondered how she would explain it to her son if he ever found out. Here she was telling this man she'd just met things about Simon that her best friends could only guess at.

“Elijah Thornquist,” it said on his card. “Calliope Associates.” And she had taken it at face value: as credentials. A business card. A thing you could mock up on a vending machine at the airport—five dollars for fifty. Her daughter, Beth, had told her all about it. She'd bought some as a joke for her new husband—a card with “Beer Taster” or something like
that on it. She realized she'd never seen her own name on a business card.

“I can't believe our Simon had anything to do with it.” Joyce Hayward paused and turned away from him. She let her gaze rest benignly on the small children squealing and splashing in the pool beyond the plate glass of the members' lounge window. “He was a complicated child, but all children are at that age—aren't they? I was complicated. My husband, George, was complicated. Beth was not so complicated but she's like that—his sister, Beth? Sensible. ‘Together' is the word for it. She's got her act together.”

“You say this happened when he was about eight.”

“This one time, yes. The church-service thing. Eight or nine, I guess. Around there. We'd moved to Wheaton, oh, a year or so earlier than that. George had just got his new job with Pitney Bowes, and we had to up and move right in the middle of the school term. Simon didn't like it, I remember, leaving all his friends, having to start all over. His sister, she was younger so it didn't matter so much to her.” Joyce smiled and took another sip of coffee, resting on the memory of her daughter's imperturbability.

“It was Episcopalian, I remember. The church. All that chanting back and forth, but George liked it—his mother had been an Episcopalian—a good way to get to know people in the community. He wanted to lay down roots, he said. Simon hated it right from the start. So did I, to be honest.”

“In the newspaper accounts, they never mentioned Simon having anything to do with it.” Mr. Thornquist raised his head as if he were setting his sites on her along the bridge of his nose.

“Well, no one knew, you see. No one but me and Beth,
I suppose. He never kept anything from his little sister. He told us he was going to do it. In a snit about something or other, having to put on his shirt and tie—get a haircut before Sunday. Something.” She looked out beyond the glass to the pool—kids admonishing each other, practicing adult things: taking sides, holding grudges. “Reverend—Wentworth? Was that his name?”

The man across from her nodded. “Did you get the feeling he meant any harm by it?”

Joyce had a vivid memory of poor Mr. Wentworth finally coming to rest in a fetal position on the floor beside the pulpit: one of his shoes had come off; she remembered noticing a hole in the heel of his sock. “It was too much of a coincidence, but I can't believe Simon really had anything to do with it; he wasn't a malicious kid. He'd never want to hurt anybody. ‘What are Pentecostals?' I remember him asking me that about a week before it happened. He'd seen something on TV, he said. About speaking in tongues.”

She shifted in her chair and leaned over to massage her Achilles tendon. “He had this knack, you see—George used to say, ‘The kid's possessed,' but it wasn't like that; Simon always knew what he was doing. It was always
him
doing it—do you know what I mean? One time when he was about four or five he caught a chill and his temperature shot up; we had to put him in a tub of ice water, to bring his temperature down. The doctor was afraid he'd go into convulsions. We were up all night with him till the fever broke. ‘Billy's dog Soldier's going to bark.' That's what he said when he opened his eyes. ‘Billy's dog Soldier's going to bark.' I'll never forget it. A minute later a dog started barking down the street somewhere. We didn't know who Billy was, some boy Simon knew—we'd
never met him. There was this barking, though. Right after he said that.”

“Were these isolated incidents or—would you say they were typical?” Thornquist asked, straightening up and reaching into his jacket; he took out a small notebook.

“The television started acting up—that was the next thing, I guess. At first we thought it was the cable company. A program would come on, or Beth would change the channel—put on something Simon didn't like—and the picture would go all funny. Sometimes it would go back to the show he wanted. The cable people couldn't figure it out. It would never happen when they were around.

“And then he got into diving, which I think made him more content with himself, less angry with the world. His father was a good swimmer and we had a pool at the house by then, and later on this one at the club. He picked it up really fast; he was fearless, he'd try anything. We got him involved in a program. His coach said he had a good ‘kinetic memory.' He started competing, winning every now and then. When he did those somersaults it was like he made time stand still.” She paused and looked out to the pool; Thornquist took a sip of coffee and crossed his legs. “He could have gone to the Olympics if it wasn't for the accident,” she continued. “The
Junior
Olympics, about twelve, thirteen years ago. The ten-meter platform: that was his thing—the tower. He hit his head coming out of a back two-and-a-half. Ended up with a horrible cut and a slight concussion. That's all, thank God. We were scared he'd done himself some permanent damage, and I guess it did, really—after that he couldn't dive anymore. For a while he wouldn't even go near a pool.”

“Do you know where he is now, Mrs. Hayward? Is there a number we could reach him at?”

Eli Thornquist regretted having the piece of pie. It had turned into a fiery lump just under his rib cage—where he always imagined his heart was. He wanted this meeting over with—the last recruit on their dream list: Simon Hayward, the best of the bunch, the most potential, supposedly—if they could track him down. He'd always imagined the food would be up to standard at a place like this—an established downtown racquet club that had been around for almost a hundred years, the pretentious plaque on the lobby wall had said. This woman across from him was pleasant enough, as pleasant as any mother could be in a conversation about a son whose life could not be distilled into a synopsis worthy of her expectations. Thornquist got the feeling she would trade her son in if she could, for one of the young men he could see now, on the tennis court beyond the pool. Glossy nonentities, whose lives would follow the indisputably satisfactory trajectory of a well-returned serve—the kind of man who mistakes nostalgia for poetry.

This woman in her tennis whites looked ten years younger than she must be—fit, slim. The sun had done its damage, though; the skin around the eyes, the backs of her hands—like the rings of a tree. She reached down to the purse beside her chair and took out a small, well-used address book. The page she turned to was a spider's nest of scrawls and amendments. She took the dainty pen Thornquist had slipped from the leather spine of his own notepad and wrote down the number on the fresh page he presented her with. She looked up quickly and gave him the kind of smile he expected from
someone in physical pain. “I hope this works out for him; he
needs
a job. A
real
job.
Something.
”

Simon Hayward closed the umbrella and let the rain pummel his face. Wet. Wetter than he'd ever been. This city like an eternal clammy car wash. Underwater wet was something else—the opposite somehow; unwettable. A spot on the top of his head was suddenly stenciled with cold rain: an arc of sensation amid the dense bristles of his crew cut. Follicle-free scar tissue.

He crossed the street through the eternal traffic. Like the endless rain, an essential part of Vancouver in his mind now; traffic fighting for any of the space left between the mountains and the ocean—this city going down in his mind as a place for cars, full of hopelessly disturbed drivers who never looked up at the Brownian lilt of the city's craggy horizon.

“I will
never
own a car,” he said out loud as he threaded his way umbrella-first through the gridlocked traffic at the
intersection
—Robson Street on a Saturday night. “I will walk my feet off first.” Simon parried an Acura trying to break through a gap in the trickle of pedestrians crossing the road. He thrust at the headlight of a BMW. In the cone of floodlit rain his half-furled umbrella looked like flapping bat wings—black, glistening. “Fuck you,” he said under his breath. Water trickled down his face; he could feel the dampness crawl through his clothes—his Bill Blass overcoat hung like something dead and bleeding on his shoulders.

Someone is dialing my number,
he thought to himself.
Mom.
His mother doing her weekly duty. His dutiful return call would ensure that the check was in the mail.
“Yes, the same address. No, this place is working out fine .
.
.
No, Janis is
still here with the dog; her friend Jeff is off somewhere planting trees. Yes, Mom, they do need more trees up here in British Columbia. Yes, it is kind of ironic, you're right. Bye, Mom. Talk to you next week.”

He worked his way through the umbrellas and clusters of pedestrians—his feet were officially wet now, his new Rockport shoes, “World Tours” or whatever they were called, leaking at the seams—till he found it, the “Caftan,” a coffee shop that wasn't a Starbucks. A place that had tanning machines in the back, for some reason—caffeine and a fix of UV somehow connected—at least that's what the people who ran the place were betting on.

Betty stopped eating to talk again; she had to force the mouthful down with an exaggerated swallow. “Jeremy was going on and on about
meridians
or whatever they're called. Your body having special places on it that control other places? Like rubbing your hand to get rid of a headache? Stuff like that.” She picked up the sandwich—a salad wrapped in a high-
fiber
flat bread—and peered at the inner workings of it. “I don't know—your head hurts because your
head
hurts. Rubbing something doesn't affect something else.” Her tongue roamed her mouth in search of vagrant scraps of sandwich as she mulled over the implications of what she had just said. Her hand came up to cover her detonating laugh. “Jesus, did I say that? I'm so stupid—” Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling and her cheeks pinked for a moment.

“It's like that woman who sued her obstetrician?” She was frowning now, silently snapping her fingers as she dug up this new memory. “'Cause he said her baby was going to be a girl, from the ultrasound? So she and her husband go and buy all
this furniture and stuff? For the baby's room? All this pink baby furniture, and they spend all this money on pink wallpaper and fancy pink curtains, whatever—making it into this, you know, this—Barbie doll girl's room? Guess what? Turns out it's a boy, so they sue the doctor for damages or whatever, 'cause the little guy's penis didn't show up on the fucking ultrasound.” She laughed through the last bit, bouncing her torso to underline it. Simon watched her breasts echo the trajectory of her shoulders, then follow through with a slower, more pronounced arc of heavy breast movement.

Inertial dampers, Simon thought. Breasts made women more graceful; their body-fat percentage made them better swimmers than men. This girl who could float better than he could: her breast the weight of an egg, maybe two eggs, he'd noticed the other night, cupping one of them after she'd taken her top off—she had turned on the desk lamp in her room, angled it against the wall to get the best effect, then pulled her sweater over her head, presenting him with her breasts like someone selling jewelry. The weight of an egg, no, two or three Grade-A-Large eggs, eggs being his unit of measure all of a sudden—the nipple small and gritty under his tongue, the surprise of a seed in a seedless grape. Betty had a ripeness about her, the fleshy newness of eighteen-year-old skin—
olive
perfection, the plump fold at her waist like the edge of a bolt of silk. Her hair was like a curtain, a straight-cut black proscenium framing her face. Her stark, aubergine lipstick always pulling her mouth to center stage . . . Simon couldn't see what she was getting at—the meridians, the ultrasound; the connection she was trying to make eluded him. Rubbing something. The penis—maybe that was it.

“Your head hurts because there's something wrong with
your head. That's what I think.” Betty licked the ends of two fingers one at a time, picked up her napkin, and dabbed at her eggplant lips. A paper napkin with a coffee cup wearing sunglasses printed on it. “Jeremy said we could come over later if we want to; they're all going to a reading or something, at the Culch, something about panoramic cameras? Whatever.” Her face wrinkled trying to remember what would be a powerful enough reason for them to go all the way over to the East Vancouver Cultural Center on a night like this: “It's a lecture about this famous photographer—they're going to have slides and everything.”

She reached over and touched Simon's hand, playing circles round his knuckles with her long fingernails, looking over the new crop of people moving through the restaurant, taking a slow deep breath after her sandwich as if she'd just done something strenuous, her tongue idly searching between her teeth. A couple walked by their table and Simon could feel the cold damp air falling from their coats. He moved his hand away from hers and picked up his empty coffee cup, wondering whether she would think he was sending her a signal—then whether or not he wanted to send her a signal. He agonized over signals, all kinds of them. He constantly doubted his own ability to read them. He was a door checker, a stove checker. He had once spent ten minutes in an underground parking lot testing the door handles of a car he'd borrowed from a friend. Thinking about what he was doing—the behavior. Not the content of it, but the process; so he would have to go back over it all again, forcing himself to concentrate this time. Obsessive-compulsive, they called it.