Dirk opened his eyes. The fuel of his attention felt spent, and the starry sky above the Home looked like a huge mirror crushed to grains. What happened? he wondered, and knowledge shivered up in him. The bonding with the others was intermittent, because the alien was parametrizing oddly in spacetime. “PuhRAMuh-try-zing—what the hell does that mean?” he asked aloud in a jet of anger.
A clogged feeling gummed his lungs, and he clutched at his throat as words began to force themselves into his mind: Parameter is the way a thing is measured, he heard his own voice speaking inside of himself. The arc is measuring itself against the coordinates of spacetime. However, the isometry—the mapping—of the arc’s 5-space coordinates to Earth’s 4-space coordinates is imperfect. So, there are going to be discontinuities—gaps—in communication between the arc and its Earthly counterparts.
“Oh.” Dirk’s lungs cleared, and he sat empty and replete as an urn. There was so much more for him to understand, so much more for him to contain in the squeezed space of his clasped skullbones that a pang of hopelessness stabbed him. He sat mutely for a while, watching the sky turn.
The disc was back in his hand before he realized that he had reached into his pocket for it. Arc, he thought. “Arc,” he said aloud and turned the object in his fingers, brightening with the marveling perception that this small, faceless coin was everything that he and the rest of the universe was not. Bizarro! He remembered the sadness of his father’s ghost and the anguish on Reena’s face. Those memories rang an adamant strength in him. “I’ll get you back, sucker. If it kills me.”
The force of that commitment soared through him, and a chamber opened in his mind. Mistings of thoughts swirled out of that chamber and congealed to knowing: He fathomed then, with flashbulb suddenness, that everything his father had been trying to tell him already resided inside him, waiting to be known. The arc touched him with the same suffusing, alien power that he had witnessed in his visions of Reena, Jiang, and Howard. He belonged with them, stupefied as they all were by the strength of the arc. Reena had the power to hear thoughts. Jiang could move objects with his mind. Howard had a way of touching the future. And Dirk’s strength? His strength was knowing. He felt the answers to all their questions within him, coiled tight as mighty springs waiting for his needful alertness to trigger them.
He floated to his feet like a man underwater. Speechless with power, he gazed up at the exhaled light of the stars and the vast surplus of black emptiness and wondered how all this mystery could pivot on him. The archaic nerves in his brain didn’t seem adequate to the task. And they weren’t. He saw then why his dead father wept for him. The loops of his body, the sparks of his mind belonged to a machine straining to execute the commands of something unspeakably alien. His whole engineering, the whole assembly of himself, no longer belonged to him. He was possessed.
In an Alien Way
Mile by mile, through fiery green conifer forests, among blue hills, and along serpentine canals that spread from the mighty Yangtze River like whiskers from a dragon, Jiang journeyed east. Overnight, he followed the railroad from Wuhu to Nanking, gravel spinning beneath his swift feet, silver tracks ribboning with starlight and occasional station signals. Ponds and lakes flew by, and in the darkness he marked them by their perfumes.
When trains approached from ahead, Jiang skidded down the rail bed to the dirt wagon road beside the tracks. The thicker darkness there unsettled him. His tremendous speed burnished the dark air with electric brush lights. Puffballs of green luminance pranced around him and whirled away into the starry night.
Jiang ignored these will-o’-the-wisps and stayed in the clear space of the rail tracks as much as he could. No trains approached from behind. The mint scent of the waterways in the riverine basin that the railroad followed replaced all thoughts. He was the journey that energized his body. Only rarely, when the wind shifted with the smell of valley grasses stained with the nightsoil of a village or a trestle bridge aimed him over a black span of water and the ghost sparks swirled in the encompassing darkness, did he wonder what was happening.
Earlier, at sunset, he had dozed off under a shaggy tree, and he had experienced a dream of a youth—a white devil with sun-crayoned hair and eyes pale as ice. “Dirk,” the dream youth had called himself. He had a smell like wet wood. Actually, when Jiang thought about it, he realized that the youth had not said anything. The dream had been of Jiang’s dead family. Wife and children, brothers and sisters—all those chewed up in the jaws of history—were there in his dream in a place as clangorous and dazzling as lightning. They wept. One of his children—the son who had been killed with his mother, Jiang’s wife, by a wayward shell during the Communist liberation—broke free of his sobs to tell him the name of the white devil who stood among them, gawking at Jiang.
“His name is Dirk, father,” he had said through the drenchings of his grief. “He is the one leading you away from our home.”
The great sorrowing among all the ghosts troubled him, and he had tried to comfort his son. “You should be happy on Sandalwood Mountain now and not grieve for me. I am still part of the toiling world. I must go where the world takes me.”
“Father—” His lachrymous voice had melted into the keening of the others, and he had to gasp deeply for breath to go on: “Father, he is not of this world.”
“But, son, he is a white devil. Look at him. He obviously is of this world. He is a youth from Golden Mountain.”
His son had made no further reply. He and the others moaned and wailed, all in a trembling circle about the white devil. And the youth just stared at him with a stupid look on his face.
What do dreams mean? Jiang queried himself to keep his mind off the sparks of gold fire moth-fluttering around him as he ran. The ancients taught that life itself is a dream. That was what his father had often told him in those fargone days of his childhood. His father had been a scholar, and that was why Jiang had grown up with no useful skill. He had managed to learn some of the one thousand characters necessary for reading and writing but barely enough to be literate before his father made the journey to Sandalwood Mountain, rushing there prematurely on the wave of famine that swept the countryside in the ninth year of Jiang’s life. From then on, he worked as a laborer, but always he cherished the few, valuable shards of knowledge his father had bestowed on him.
His father would have known the meaning of the dream. Jiang felt fortunate that his father’s ghost and the ghosts of his ancestors were not in the dream. Only his own family was there, those who had known him as a man. But why were they weeping for me?
No answer came to him, and he thought very little more about it. The wet wind running beside him was the companion he preferred to thoughts, which only muddied his mind. Besides, the more he thought, the slower he went and the more exertion he felt. With his attention on the glassy rails of the tracks, he became a machine streak, easeful, serene, resting as even eagles rest on rings of wind. What did it matter where he was going? What did it matter what demon carried him? Was this demon any stranger than an aircraft bomb wailing its doom-scream across the sky or an enraged mob in full glitter trampling children and animals in their mindless frenzy? He had witnessed both and more. Those horrors lived in his bones. But bones are dumb and eventually broken to the dirt that feeds plants. Life is a dream faster than the fleetest imagination. Demon, carry me on and on. I am an old man and have nothing left to leave behind. I belong wherever I am.
But Jiang really didn’t feel like an old man anymore, and that was the chief reason why he did not object to the demonic force empowering him. The ice age that had been leaning on his shoulders had lifted, and he felt younger and more alert than ever. And here, in the night, he was the one living thing left on Earth.
A train mourned from around the bend, its headlight finally appearing like the low doorway of the moon. Jiang leaped down the embankment and flitted among rasping bushes into darkness. Atoms bright as sunlight breezed off him, flustering in the eddies of speed at
his sides. A few of the hot motes drifted past his line of sight, and Jiang’s mindless rapture jolted. The burrs of light had faces!
Jiang slowed and looked about him. Clots of fire whipping off of him scattered in the wake of his rush and settled like weed tufts on the ground and on the black-soaked branches of shrubs. He still moved too swiftly to see them clearly, but when he slowed he saw even less. At last, he glimpsed a few that drifted slightly ahead of him, and he saw with a fascination that slowed him almost to a stop that each spark was a surly face buckling with cruel laughter. The train bellowed by, and its wind snatched the imp faces away, hurling them into the night.
He tried to run again, and the boastful energy uncoiled in his legs and sent him dashing over the dirt road. When the fiery flecks gusted about him once more, he avoided gazing too closely at them. He was a crazy pony, racing for nowhere, night-mad, busy as the stars flying through the blackness. Fire-points skirled off him like electricity breaking free and breaking up. His heart drummed its bravery. And horror and awe danced in him, old partners who needed no conversation.
***
Dawn clouds crumpled the darkness like a used up stencil. Dirk Heiser, who had sat up all night on the roof of the Home pondering his fate, waited until the last star vanished before wearily standing up. He still clutched the arc in his right hand, and he held it up to the orange clouds in the east. The colors around it seemed to have changed. Instead of rainbows, purple whiskers of light brushed the air, trembling with the micromovements of his muscles.
Dirk put the arc in his pocket and ambled back to his room. Donnie Lopes was asleep on the floor with his blanket over him. Dirk nudged him with his sneakered foot. “Hey, your bed’s two feet away,” he said with an edge of his customary gruffness. “Think you can crawl that far?”
Donnie winced awake and sleepily regarded the floor and then his cot. “I had a nightmare,” he groaned and clumsily rose to his knees.
“Yeah—me, too.” Dirk took the aluminum cane from where it leaned by the bed and dropped it next to Donnie. The sight of the handicapped kid, tottery with sleep, laboring to stand, inspired Dirk with abhorrence—his usual odium for all weakness, because life belonged to the strong. But for the first time his hatred balked, and a lenient mood flowed in him. Lit with unexpected caring, Dirk amazed himself with the perception that he was no different from Donnie. They were both carnal accidents, bound by loss to the same unbegun future. They were orphans left in the care of strangers to excavate their own lives from the afterlives of their parents. Life itself was fierce and pure, instinctual. Cruelty belonged to the impulse of the beast unfettered from instincts. Only humans had that freedom, that curse of choice that could turn the ferocity of life back on itself.
These thoughts called a silence over Dirk’s acrimony, and he bent to help Donnie. As he lifted him under his arm on his weak side and guided him into his cot, Donnie gaped dubiously at him. “Are you all right?”
Dirk’s old disgust flashed again, and he dumped Donnie on his bunk. “If I was all right, would I be here with you?”
“What time is it?” Donnie asked, the cups of his eyes wet with fatigue.
“Forget the time,” Dirk replied gruffly, carefully placing the cane beside the bed. “It’s spring break, remember?”
Dirk’s usual rancor for Donnie slimmed away, and the affection he felt for the bleary-faced kid amazed him. Nothing like a ghost to turn your head around, Dirk said to himself. The horror of the previous night had quelled to a stunned acceptance of his crazy destiny. He had no heart anymore for petty fears or annoyances.
He went to his closet and took out his blue denim duffel bag with WHOP YOUR JAW stenciled in red balloon letters around a dazed, boot-chinned cartoon head resting on a street curb with knockout stars and comets whirring about it. Into the bag, he dumped his entire drawer of clean underwear and socks. He selected several of his favorite silk shirts and a pair of French-seam jeans and put them in the bag, too. Dirk prided himself as a sharp dresser. For the last couple of years, he had spent all the money from his thefts on second-skin shirts, filament-on-cotton jackets, and primitive print underwear. He wasn’t afraid of any bad situation, as long as he looked good.
At his desk, he saw that the ghost had been right: The Judas Boys had cleaned him out. His money was gone. He rummaged through his clutter of coral chunks, belt buckles, pen knives, decals, and clippings of motorcycles and decided to leave it all behind. He took out his two copies of Penthouse, buried them in his bag, then thought better of it and put them in Donnie’s desk drawer.
After removing the arc and placing it carefully in the side pouch of his bag, he took off his clothes, which he had worn all day yesterday and through the harrowing night, and dumped them into the pile of laundry in his closet. For the work at hand, he decided he’d wear his western boots, black ninja drawstring pants, and a tight black T-shirt with a wide neckline and slant-cut short sleeves to reveal the muscles he’d spent the last five years eating pain to build.
The large shower room was empty, and he turned on three of the showers and trained the hot water on him. In the midst of his lather, a voice called, “Can’t you hear me?”
He whirled about, squinting through the sting of soap in his eyes, and saw no one. He pressed his face into the shower spray to clear away the soap, and the voice returned, “Where are you? Satan—hear me!”
“Reena?” In the noise from the showers, he hadn’t recognized her voice. “Hey, I’m right here. What’s going on? You all right?”
“I’m not all right. This is horrible. Where are you? Can you see me?”
“No, I can’t see you. I’m taking a shower. What’s horrible?” He shook the water from his face and turned around to see one of the younger kids swathed in his bath towel standing in the doorway to the shower room, looking at him with a querying frown.
“Some people like to sing in the shower,” Dirk told him, reaching for his towel. “I like to talk.”
He wrapped the towel about him and jogged back toward his room, listening intently along the way. His self-consciousness before the younger kid had squelched his tenuous link with Reena. He needed to sit down and concentrate.
Mr. Paawa was waiting for Dirk in his room. He had Dirk’s duffel bag in hand and rummaged through it.
“Hey, you got a warrant or something?” Dirk said indignantly when he strode into the room.
“Wat? You go summah vacation?” Mr. Paawa asked in an uncharacteristically soft voice, dumping Dirk’s clothes on his bare cot. “Get dress.’
Donnie snoozed on the lower bunk. Mr. Paawa stooped over to be sure he was still breathing and unhurt. After Dirk put on his underwear, drawstring pants, and T-shirt, Mr. Paawa escorted him barefoot out of the room. “Mistah Leonard ask fo see you, tough guy.”
Mr. Leonard, the Home supervisor, a bald, paunchy man, loved kids and made a great Santa Claus, but he’d never had any sympathy for Dirk. For the last two years, he had been striving to have Dirk transferred to the State Correctional Facility for Youths, affectionately known by the Home kids as the Clam: Once it took in an offender, they never came back to the Home. Mr. Paawa had taken Dirk on a tour of the Clam a year ago, thinking that the grim lockup might scare some righteousness into the bully. Dirk brought along cigarettes and slipped them to the gang members he knew from school, and they joked about going straight. To hell. The cramped, sour-stenched, and filthy cells seemed no more horrible to Dirk than the tight and uncomfortable space within the fitted bones of his skull.
Mr. Leonard wasn’t in his office yet, and Mr. Paawa made Dirk sit on a stool in the corridor to wait. The stool, situated near the glass-paned door of the office where Mr. Paawa or one of the secretaries could see him at all times, also provided a window that gazed out on the playground.
While waiting, Dirk listened deeply. Somewhere inside of him, Reena’s hysterical voice continued. He could feel her like a jarred loose memory, haunting closer. He stared at the windowsill, flattened his att
ention against the notched, whelked, and pocked surface where other delinquents had scored their rage, and he heard her.
Dirk!
The urgency of her cry yanked him free of his senses, and he found himself abruptly rushing through a tunnel of charred light toward a figure standing in a bare room. The green-smocked figure of Reena stood in windowless room. A naked bulb in a cage high above her head filled the cubicle with mustard yellow light. The only furniture: a spread open bedroll and a pillow.
Reena, I’m here, Dirk announced, finding himself hovering mothwise about the stark luminosity of the bulb.
She didn’t hear him. A pain like a tight-fisted apple had lodged in her chest. Despair. She didn’t understand at all what was happening to her. The thud of her heart in her ears created a demented graffito against the wall of white noise that was a mix of everyone’s thoughts.
Solemn, solemn, solemn—splendidly solemn.
God plays with dirt! Look at us! The splendor of his mud!
Teenie weenie meanie curled in its shell—
She’s distressed. I must put her back on medication. It’s the only fair thing to do.
That was Yannick. He watched her. In the green room, under the brown light, the mad often did their dance. She wouldn’t dance. She just stood there and faced him. Behind that slot of mirrored glass in the door, he watched her to see if she would dance. She focused on the flaked green paint on the door jamb where others before her had scratched to get out. The scabby wall afforded a terrain vivid enough to block the mutterings of the insane.
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