A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (28 page)

“With the right clothes—hard hats, safety boots. That's all we need—for now. The word is, they're going to be putting in some kind of high-tech security system.” She was sensi
ble and efficient the way his mother had been—in a way that Pam had never been—and this gave him comfort. The knowledge required of a pragmatic march through life was always within arm's reach of Jenny. She was just like Mrs. Abbott in other ways too. The way she took her time in answering him
sometimes
—not because she was indecisive, it was more to do with calm deliberateness.

Not his real mother, no. No one reminded him of his real mother. She was still a mystery. The shadowy figure with a soft voice—a smell that awoke in him sometimes; the feel of her hands under his arms when she picked him up—all vague and elusive like a star that looms bright only in your peripheral vision. None of the permutations of his world had uncovered anything new about her. That part of his life—the vacancy of it—had remained intact.

“I'll ask Jeff tomorrow,” Jenny was saying now as she turned away from the building, after a silence. “See if he can set it up for us.” Jeff Turnbull, the lab supervisor. CEO and lab supervisor of PsiberTech Incorporated. For a second it didn't sound quite right—the name “PsiberTech.” And Peter remembered, then, with a chilling pang of remorse (the wind seemed to pass right through him for a moment) and contrition too for letting his guard down—letting this detail fall away from his consciousness—that the name of the organization was really “Calliope” and not “PsiberTech.” It
had
been “Calliope,” he had to believe it, absolutely—and in some ways it still was. If he was going to hold on to Pam he would have to hold on to that name as well.

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

Simon couldn't believe how screwed up the world was—the stock market way down for some reason, some dork in the White House he'd never heard of—well, he
had
heard of him of course, but not till this latest “adjustment” had made him actually conscious of the fact that he was part of a new version of things. Again.

Taking out Pam's father had been a little more repercussive than he'd anticipated. Pam's nipped-in-the-bud dad must have been like debris clogging the narrows of a stream: the poor slob had clout, a logjam of a guy—maybe little Pam her
self had been the variable. Or it was just cumulative and each successive adjustment made more and more of an impact on the time line. He would never know, and right now he would rather not think about it—he didn't have the energy for it.

The sheer weight of it all bearing down on his shoulders and neck (it felt as if his memories had real mass; each swivel of his head made him stagger) had forced him to sort things out, concentrate on the boundary line between what was and what had been.

He lay back on his bed and made himself think about something else—about music. He'd just bought a CD by a group called the Havana Gila Monsters. They were into a strange pastiche of klezmer and salsa—which was the sort of music he liked, of course; because technically he had been here all his life—the most recent part of him, at least—the paradox again:
I like these guys—sort of.
But Beatles music would show up in a bank or a supermarket: a Muzak version of “Yesterday” or “Help.” Occasionally he'd hear the real thing on the car radio. Bits and pieces of lyric and melody were always out there somewhere.

His vintage vinyl version of the White Album had disappeared he realized then, lost in the shuffle of things along the way—all of his Beatles memorabilia: his two yards of Beatles wallpaper; the two ticket stubs from the Shea Stadium concert back in 1965—he'd never owned any of it. The music was around here of course, part of the fabric of things, out there in the record stores—but this latest version of himself was not the truly enthralled fan that he'd been in the alternate versions of himself. There was all that to contend with—the dissonance thing, the ambiguity of all that he remembered.

He still
was
a dedicated Beatles fan, the old part of him—
the pre-“Pamicide” part of him was, anyway. It was at the root of who he was; there was no getting away from it.

Another thing: there was no Madonna in this world, or the Spice Girls—which for Simon was a mini-tragedy; he'd always honored them as cherished comedic targets. No Howard Stern; or David Letterman. No Sharon Tate either, but her daughter—the child she had after the one with Polanski—was a runway model.

But there were others that seemed to fill the void: an abysmally atrocious talk-show host with a parrot for a second banana; a pre-fabricated superstar “singing” group of Barbie doll wannabes from Glasgow called Butterscotch; a band from Australia that reminded him of the disco incarnation of the Bee Gees.

Sometimes the Beatles were completely gone from his consciousness, usually after a few too many rum-and-Cokes; hours would go by and all of a sudden a snippet of song would pop into his head and for a second he would hold on to the belief that it was all his—that he'd been struck by a lightning bolt of musical inspiration, that the lyrics of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” had emerged from the birth canal of his own fulsome imagination.

What bothered him was that his lapses of memory weren't consistent. He would say things to chicks he met in bars and they didn't have a clue what he was talking about. He would be derailed by the old time lines of references, the ones from way back before he was into the RV game; they would wash over him and short-circuit his funny bone. The cultural raw materials of the world he was in now would fade away. It felt like he was disabled sometimes—as if someone had cut out his tongue.

He got up from the bed and plugged in the small hotel kettle. Tea, now, was his beverage of choice. Always had been, of course. The old part, the coffee part, had been pushed into the background. He looked in the mirror and the image of himself blurred for an instant; a wave of vertigo crashed against his consciousness:
This is not me
—the hair parted in the middle, tied in a ponytail at the back. The way his teeth looked, the shirt he was wearing—then it would shift back into position; the constant of who he was now, and always had been.

He wondered what Peter Abbott was up to, whether his Pamlessness had driven him over the edge; what Jane was doing. Jane Franklin . . . Jesus. A pang of something—lust mixed with sorrow—washed over him. The yearning for times gone by, a nostalgia for what he'd never experienced; a flash of realization that he'd taken things into his own hands and spoiled everything.

He was suddenly overwhelmed with images that seemed to echo and bifurcate and fork along paths of possibility—
future
possibility—even as they popped into his head. The real world was breaking up into the subroutines of the unreal. The surreal. The Never-Never-Land of
what-might-have-been
. The dizziness came back and he reached out for the sink and missed. He ended up on the floor staring at broken tile where the pipe behind it broke through the wall.
This is real,
he told himself.
The here-and-now
—the world he had created for himself.

Go easy on yourself; take your time,
he told himself. The recovery period after doing in Pam had been longer than for any of the others (his body was wearing away or his aura was suffering from ether erosion); he didn't want to face anything
like that again—the blood in his urine for two days straight, the headaches, the vomiting. After slipping his hand into the guy's chest back in 1967—it seemed like a good idea at the time—his hand had emerged from the ether for a second. Not his whole body, but the displacement had been enough, something to do with spreading himself too thin, maybe; the disjunction of hand and body. Anyway, it had been like grabbing on to the door handle of a car going by on the freeway. Tweaking the guy's coronary artery—it must have set things in motion. Coronary occlusion cutting off more than just blood.

He could travel into the past; change things, manipulate events—he had to remember that.
Be proud of it, profit from it—just don't overdo it.
The trip itself was routine; it was the fine-tuning part he was still working on. The intricacies of gauging the ripple factor.

“I'm a luthier,” he said looking down at his hands as if he were ashamed to admit it. “I make violins, violas—a cello every so often.” On the phone he'd said that a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of his had given him Simon's telephone number—and his e-mail address.

Simon and the luthier—his name was Trevor—were in a small Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto. Trevor looked afraid all of a sudden. His eyes blinked as he brought the cup to his lips. “It's not the quantities, the list of ingredients
themselves
—
that
would be more than enough. The actual recipe, I would consider a bonus.” He picked up his napkin and wiped his mustache.

“How much?”

“Pardon?”

“What's your budget? How much is it worth to you—this formula? I mean, what could you do with it? Make fake Strads? Make new ones? What—”

“A million dollars, if it works. Within a year, say. And if we license it, I'd give you a percentage of what other people make—‘points.' Isn't that what they call it?” He sat up as if buoyed by his own street wisdom and took another sip of cappuccino. Simon looked out the window into the busy street. An old woman went by with what looked like a cat or a small dog inside her overcoat. “I wouldn't try to pass them off as the real thing,” he said, putting down his cup. “That would be far too difficult. They would have my name on them. My imprimatur.” He smiled and looked around him as if the audacity of the remark were astounding everyone in the restaurant.

A remote viewing session for real cash this time—hard currency. Five hundred thousand dollars—but with no risk of implosion, even if he did materialize. Unless Cremona, Italy, in 1737 harbored one of his distant ancestors. But he wouldn't be doing a real jump. No need to touch down for this one—it was strictly an intelligence gathering session. Just like the old days, the
alt
days. German for “old” seemed more suitable, somehow: the
alt
-ernative days.

“People have been trying to come up with the varnish formula since the day he died—some say tung oil's the main ingredient, others shrimp shells boiled in lye. We don't really know. Cat piss, all kinds of things—but he did write it down very close to his death in 1737. That we
do
know. There are accounts of his contemporaries attesting to the fact.” He had a slight accent that Simon attributed to his line of work more than anything else—a hissing attenuation to his “s”s.

“They're worth a lot of money, right? The actual Strads?”

“At auction, if the provenance is in good order, the
condition
—a Stradivarius can fetch, oh, upwards of two, three million dollars.”

Simon raised his eyebrows out of politeness—a business politeness—he knew what Strads were worth but he forced himself to seem surprised. He took up his own cup and turned in the direction of the draft from the door: a couple had just come in with a baby in a car seat; the woman looked a bit like Betty—the dark, straight-cut hair, the round face. “I can't guarantee anything. Fifty thousand up front no matter what I come back with. Do we have a deal?”

The guy's mustache was tipped with froth—he nodded and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I wish I could go with you. I'd pay you even for the privilege of being in the same room as the man himself—watching him work.” He looked off into space, imagining it. “I suppose you can't take pictures. Now
that
would be something—”

“I used to know someone who could do that, but he's no longer with us.”

The waiter came by and the luthier took out his charge card right away. The guy was in a hurry for some reason and it disappointed Simon. He was actually enjoying himself.

“You talk about Strads and”—Trevor was still fussing with his wallet but he shot Simon a smile to let him know he was listening—“and every time you say that, I think you're talking about ‘Strats,' you know? The electric guitar? Old Fender Stratocasters—the kind Hendrix used to play? They're valuable too, aren't they? The old ones.”

The luthier said nothing for a second—his face was blank. Then, “Fender?” Simon nodded. “Like—on a, car?” He
frowned and looked down at the check with his Visa card sitting on it, then out the window into the street (the woman was back, or someone much like her, but the cat was gone), his face stilled by the subroutine of recollection at it circled back, looping, gleaning—and coming up with nothing.

.
.
.
digging up Peter's roots

Simon's St. Christopher medal loomed like a dinner plate before him. He was suspended in the ether preparing himself for his glide down into Asheville, North Carolina, and the National Climatic Data Center: the repository of over fifty years' worth of daily weather maps, all stored on microfilm.

His medal floated nose high, and the tricky ether light turned the gold into green, then copper, then back to gold again. He reached up and stuffed it into his shirt; touching it made him think of buttered popcorn, like the time his hand had passed through the bag of gold nuggets at the old Spanish
mission site in New Mexico. But the medal was part of him here, along with his clothes, so he could grab it, feel its texture without passing through it. His dowsing device—what he would use to track down Peter Abbott's conception date.

Down into a high-ceilinged storage room with its arched glass roof and ornate cornice: it seemed more like a church than a storage room—gun-metal gray angle-iron shelving, magazine boxes and loose-leaf binders. And microfilm canisters, an aisle of them about a half a football field long, on shelves at least sixteen feet high.

He dipped down into the nearest aisle, took out his St. Christopher medal, and let it dangle from his neck as he slowly drifted in and out of the stacks of stored film. His body tingled as his flesh and bone passed through the steel shelving.
Think about the guy, Peter Abbott, as a little boy, now as a baby
—the medal started to move off by itself like the nose of a beagle sniffing along a fence—
Remember what Gordon said—don't push it. Clear your head, let the medal do the dowsing for you. Think about the guy as a sperm now, slamming into the egg, the moment of conception . . .

Something grabbed at the medal, he felt it suddenly cut into the back of his neck. He was being pulled like a balloon on a string, up and out of the aisle, then down, through the floor—the concrete, a syrup of viscous resistance for a moment—then into darkness. The medal swerved to the left: then up and to the right, the chain digging into his ear. It took him up through the floor again into the main storage area—to a shelf near the wall. The medal came to a standstill and floated at eye level; it began to wobble like a coin spun and released on a table, the shimmying vibration accelerating till it thrummed to a blur of smudged glitter.

This was it; this one here.
Simon moved forward, headfirst so that his face, his eyes, his whole head passed through the canister of microfilm. His optic nerve, his whole brain it felt like, was scanning the coiled acetate, frame by frame, map by map . . . day by day by day, back, back to the day of Peter's conception: July 15, 1962. He'd found it. Delta T.

Like a phosphene in his mindful eye, his medal down again, down into the grainy emulsion. It seemed to be dancing, spelling it out like a worker bee telling the hive where to find the nectar—this way, that . . . He felt himself shrinking (his head slipped free of the medallion chain) and condensing into a mite of consciousness. His medal was the size of a manhole cover now, rolling along ahead of him, across the surface of the map marked “July 15, 1962.” He knew the time, now he needed to know the place: x and y coordinates; longitude and latitude.
St. Christopher, show me the way—

The medal as big as a spinning city block, now—a baseball stadium; he was skimming the surface of the map like a low-flying stealth fighter swooping down in the wake of the giant medal, past fingerprint swirls of isobars, temperature gradients, lakes, rivers, hieroglyphs of highways and county lines, state borders, train tracks . . . across the continent to California.

And there it was—the exact place: no mistaking it. Santa Monica, California.

He had his coordinates (applause as the music reaches a crescendo): “Peter Abbott: THIS Is Your Life. And
this
is where it ALL began . . .”

And where it's all going to end.