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

sailed off somewhere into outer space, circled the universe, and come back around to slap the back of his head. Providence or Fate or some such abstract label for the powers that be seemed to be falling down on him out of the glaring, sheet- metal-gray sky. He felt a galvanic tingle along his arm and across his chest. His St. Christopher medal seemed adhered to his skin— stuck on you . . . He stood up and threw his coffee cup into the trash bin at the bottom of the steps. Betty followed him, and as he turned around to look at her she wiped one eye with the heel of her hand.
    â€œHere. You better take this; I don’t think I’m going to have time to read it before I leave anyway.” He handed her the John Lennon biography and she stuffed it in her bag.
    â€œGet me an address, okay? And a phone number?” She took his arm and wrapped both of hers around it; he could feel the weight of her—many eggs’ worth of weight—and asthey walked off, her large purse, burdened now with the John Lennon book, gently slapped his thigh.
    They headed up Robson Street into the glare of the sun. They were going to a used-record store and after that a noodle place on Granville Street near the Orpheum Theater. Their last meal together was the plan—before he went away. “For good,” he was going to tell her in the restaurant. Even if this psychic thing didn’t work out he wasn’t coming back for very long. He’d come back to Vancouver to clear out his apartment, then head on out to Chicago. Stay with his mother for a bit; check out the bartending situation out there. That’s what he planned to tell her—there was no way he could spend a fucking day with his mother, never mind live with her, but, hey, you say what you have to say. “Expediency” was the word for it, wasn’t it? One of those ends-justify-the-means words. Like “extricate.” An arm’s-length word.
    â€œJeremy did my chart? It says we’re sort of really matched astrologically—Libra and Aquarius. Did you know that?”
    â€œHow would I know that. Horoscopes are fucking bullshit.”
    â€œHow can you be a psychic and not believe in astrology?”
    â€œI’m not a psychic, okay? Weird shit happened to me when I was a kid so they figure I can do this stuff.” He pulled away from her, disengaging his arm with the help of the other one. “It’s bullshit, okay?” As she finally let go of him he felt the tingle of energy again: a shiver of warmth running down through his head and into his chest.
    The voices—they weren’t bullshit, but he wasn’t going to get into that now. The stuff that had happened to him when he was a kid: that too had nothing to do with all this New Age TV horoscope shit—one-eight-hundred-rip-me-off. Butshe wouldn’t understand that either. Jesus. How in the hell did I ever let it get this far? “It’s all, FUCKing, BULLshit,” he said then, louder than he’d wanted to. He had come to a halt and was brushing at his sleeve, swiping at his overcoat, as if her hands had left a trail of crumbs and chocolate from her pastry—or some of her wet mascara.
    He looked up at her and she was crying again. “I love you, Simon,” she said, in a way that was more like a question than a statement. Or a statement that demanded as weighty an answer.
    He turned away without saying anything and moved ahead of her, striding up Robson through the late-afternoon crowd: people on inline skates and businessmen and baby-faced teenagers with cell phones. A guy with a scraggly beard was holding out a Styrofoam cup, his check sport jacket soiled to the texture and color of the gravel in the parking lot he was standing next to, his shredded white sneakers as unwhite as the white line in the center of the street—his outfit like camouflage, Simon figured. Some kind of accelerated, evolutionary, urban survival