A Fold in the Tent of the Sky by Michael Hale Page A

He looked over at Betty, her face radiant, carried off by a laugh track. He wondered if he could ever compete with that, why he bothered. The last time they made love she’d insisted on leaving the TV on through it all. Timing her orgasm with a commercial so she wouldn’t miss any of the show.
    â€œHello. This is a message for Simon Hayward. It’s Eli Thornquist calling, Calliope Associates. It’s about a job, Mr. Hayward —quite a good one as a matter of fact—if you’re interested at all. You can get me at . . .” He’d guessed wrong—or maybe not; he sensed there was a connection to his mother one way or another. His first impulse was to play the message again, but he touched his medal instead, three times.

5
    I know what a rose is . . . you ain’t no rose.
    Peter and Larry were in the “Refectory,” the lounge off the terrace by the pool. Couches, a big TV in the corner, a steady breeze from the ocean. Coffee right there, all the time; a bowl of fresh fruit; muffins. This was where they came to meet the other recruits as they showed up. Not formally meet them—that wasn’t the drill—but one at a time, two at a time, drifting in off the terrace, or in from the pool.
    â€œI can get there from here—the there, there. You know what I mean? The other side of here? I used to be a kid who couldn’t speak and now—Jesus, dictionaries, libraries of fucking dictionaries.” Larry talked with his body as much as his mouth. He stood leaning against the wall by the coffee urn and pumped out the words with his tattooed forearms—old tattoos, Vietnam vintage, with fading dragons and mottoes. He had a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other; Peter could see ash ready to fall as he windmilled and conducted his words; the coffee seemed to float on gimbals—somehow he didn’t spill a drop. “I get laryngitis, from talking all the time. In here, in my head, that kind.” Larry with a cigarette in his mouth now, fighting the line of smoke, trying to squint it away. “Sometimes I get so caught up in it, what they have to say, I don’t stop to take a breather. And the pictures. I’ve always had the pictures, on and off—way before the voices. Workaholic.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s me. If it’s working, it doesn’t feel like work. You know what I mean?” A quick shot of coffee, then back at it.
    â€œMy late brother used to say, be careful with it, don’t let it take over your life—but what does that mean, really? In the end. Life takes over your life.”
    His shirt had a faint blue-gray stain about the size and shape of a melting Dalí pocket watch just under the breast pocket from a leaky pen sometime in the distant past—a shirt with a tab collar, a piece for the Smithsonian. Peter felt that if he touched it he would know exactly how the stain got there. That’s how far he’d progressed to this point. Or regressed, depending how you looked at it.
    Larry McEwan was another member of the Calliope group out here in paradise. He could project images onto film; from his head right through the lens of a camera. Peter had seen him do this at a sort of get-acquainted reception that had ended with Larry sending someone down to the lab for a Polaroid camera. He’d gotten Peter to point it at him and stood there staring into it like someone ready for a sword fight; his right hand poised in front of the lens—the “perfection” sign, the index finger making a circle with the thumb. When he wanted the shutter released, he pulled back his hand and yelled as if he were chopping a brick in half with his knuckles. Sometimes he used his “thing-a-ma-jig,” he said—a piece of hollow plastic pipe the size of a lipstick; but he didn’t have it with him so he had to make do with his fingers.
    He’d been trying to take a picture of Anita’s