A Fold in the Tent of the Sky Read Online Free Page B

testify: My name is Peter and I’m an actor, but more than that, I’m a repressed psychic, clairvoyant, sensitive, whatever jargon you want to dress it up in, pretending to be an actor. The acting is a way of using it, exploiting it without admitting it—without dealing with it.
    â€œIs that the only reason? Plain old procrastination?”
    â€œYou tell me. It must be in that file somewhere.” She would have to work for it.
    She stopped making notes and got up from the chair as if the meeting were over, crossed the room to the opposite wall, which was a hefty accordion folding partition—he hadn’t noticed it till now—and opened it enough to get them through.
    Beyond it he could see an expensive reclining chair withsomething like a dentist’s lamp attached to it, and a plain swivel office chair beside it. There were no visible windows, only floor-to-ceiling drapes along the far wall. Like a curtain waiting to go up. The light change threw him off—the room was washed in a soft red glow from the lamp attached to the recliner.
    â€œSit down, please, Pete. Make yourself comfortable. It’s not what you think. Don’t worry.” He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know what she thought he was thinking it meant.
    â€œI’m going to hypnotize you in a way. It’s not really hypnosis, it’s more like sensory deprivation. I’m going to teach you how to relax to the point where you almost fall asleep and stop right there—at the borderline between waking and sleeping—what’s called the hypnagogic state. It’s a variation of the ganzfeld.”
    â€œGanzfeld?”
    â€œIt means ‘whole field.’ It’s a way to cut out the junk your senses are bombarded with, allow you to concentrate.”
    She made him lean back and hold still while she taped what looked like half a Ping-Pong ball over each eye—he asked her and she said that was exactly what they were. She moved the lamp closer (he could hear the faint twang of its springs) and a rosy glow filled his field of vision.
    â€œNow, what I want you to do is try to imagine yourself floating, about two feet above the chair, then when you feel comfortable with that, another two feet—then try to see if you can get up near the ceiling, or even further if you can—up into the room above. There’s something up there—a target. I’m going to give you about twenty minutes, then bring youout of it, have you describe it all. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get very far today—like anything else, it takes practice.”
    She put headphones over his ears—he heard the slow crash of waves, then a gentle voice, her voice, taking him through relaxation exercises. His first inclination was to resist—he’d spent all his life doing it. But he felt obliged to play along, so he took a few deep breaths and let it all wash over him—the sea soundscape, the sunset glow; there was a nostalgic comfort to it all. His earliest memories were tinged and textured with a background shimmer of other people’s thoughts and feelings, the chatter of conversations just out of earshot. It all came back to him, a rustling swell of them.
    Her voice on the tape again, telling him to rise out of the chair. He lost his sense of where his body ended and where it began. The cushion support was imperceptible now. His extremities dissolved into a tingling displacement. And the light shifted: the rosy glow turned yellow, then green, blue—then back to yellow.
    â€œRise out of the chair.” Jane’s voice in his ears: calming, but insistent.
    It was as if someone had removed a pair of constricting goggles from his eyes; Peter could see with a clarity and crispness that made him think of the View-Master he’d had as a kid, the little stereoscopic camera toy that clicked through images of his favorite Disney characters, the colors lush and