Dirk slung his duffel bag over his shoulder, picked up his stub-toed western boots, and smiled at Donnie. “See you downstream, buddy.”
“The Judas Boys are in the playground, Donnie,” the redhead jabbered excitedly after Dirk walked out. “They’re asking for Dirk. Looks like they’re gonna break his face.”
Dirk lag-stepped outside the door to step into his boots, overheard that, and smiled. The arc in his fist burned like an icecube. He swagged vauntily through the camphor-scented hallway and down the sepia-lighted stairs. He pirouetted into Carry Tiger to Mountain, a tai chi movement, whirling his duffel bag under the red glare of the exit sign, and burst through the push handle door into wincing brightness.
While his eyes adjusted to the brash light, he reached inward for the new strength that had carried him when he had been with Reena. It was there. Glisteningly cold, not just in his palm but in all the hollows of his body, the alien power was closer than ever.
Dirk’s attention huddled under the spiking rays of his squint against the morning sun, and he focused the alien’s alertness into itself: Who are you? he asked.
Inertia smeared through him like the tug of a fast elevator. Sound liquefied, and astonishment gasped to fright as Dirk became aware of the alien’s consciousness. It shivered with the sensation of I. It dwelled inside him, watching him, like the still eye of a falcon hanging over everything.
By the time his sight relaxed to the hot brilliance of the outside, Dirk drummed with bravery. He ambled across the asphalt and the red dirt of the playground in a casual gait, free as a poem. He admired the cat briers that had climbed halfway up the backstop, their leaves flapping through the wire mesh in hot green tongues. He traced the momentum of the clouds over the deep-keeled hills, feeling their soundless power billow in him. And he faced Ipo and Chud with evangelic calm.
They wore zoris, baggy trousers, and gaudy aloha shirts that clung to their bulks like rumpled Christmas wrappings. “You lookin’ happy,” Ipo mumbled. “I hope foah real. Foah your sake.”
A stink, of mundungus or spongy punk tinder, tainted the air around the two Judas Boys. “Clowns make me laugh,” Dirk said.
Chud jumped forward like a truck slipping gears, and Ipo stopped him by slapping a hand across his chest as thick and brown as a steak. “You got da money?” Ipo asked.
“What do you think, coconut head?”
Dirk’s eyes gleamed, animated, his body springy as a prizefighter, and Ipo figured he had to be packing to be so cocksure. But in his drawstring pants and tight black T-shirt, he had no place to hide a gun. It had to be in the duffel bag. After this brief assessment, Ipo’s fist flashed out and up from his hip.
Dirk saw Ipo’s weight shift before his hand even clenched, and he easily dodged the blow by pulling back his head, not bothering to budge his feet. In the instant that Ipo leaned off balance, Dirk sprang forward and whipped his arms open into White Crane Spreads Its Wings.
The blow hit Ipo with thunderstroke force, and the big man flew backward into the dirt. A cheer burst from the kids who had gathered to see the confrontation. Whistles and jeers slashed the air.
Dirk pranced on the balls of his feet, but his strength had suddenly and thoroughly drained out of him. He felt blown out and fragile as a lightbulb. What happened? A hot filament of fright burned the length of his spine when he saw both Ipo and Chud bounding toward him. He ducked toward Snake Creeps in the Grass, and his knees buckled.
Chud seized Dirk by his hair and jerked him briskly backward so he fell backward in the dirt. Ipo grabbed him under the jaw and lifted him upright. “Toilethead t’inks he know goong foo,” his tense breath spat in Dirk’s trembling face. “Get ‘em in dah car.”
Dirk’s arm twisted behind him with grotesque pain, he shuffled toward a battered, rust-freckled car. Shock gripped him more severely than the searing pain in his shoulder. Where was the alien? What had happened to the cold strength of the arc? The fire in his shoulder fanged up into his neck, and he howled loudly. “Hey, let up!”
“Too late, toilethead,” Ipo gnashed through clenched teeth and wrenched the car door open.
The pain stabbed sharper, and gruff hands spun him about. He eyed the crowd of boys, slack-jawed faces stunned loose from their voices. With round-eyed fascination, they gawked to watch the Home tough taken out like garbage.
Dirk’s haggard eyes glimpsed Donnie in the throng, his oil-shiny face merry with satisfaction. He leaned on his cane and waved with his fingertips like a grandmother. Then a hand fisted in Dirk’s hair, yanked his head back, and slammed it against the windowsill of the car door.
Pain cracked his senses. Darkness, velvety with motion, enveloped him. He dropped away like a calved glacier, falling free into an astral ocean of chilly black fire. Pain dimmed, laughing voices faded, and he fell alone into a lively darkness.
Weightless, plummeting, soaring, and blind, Dirk shed himself. He dipped and drifted like the changing notes of a song. At the very center, he knew stillness, stretched on the rack of a snowflake. He was unintelligible. And he was the conversation in a heart.
Weird. A thought icicled in the dark, and the cold touch of the thought infused Dirk with its Being. He moved. The very sensation of moving seemed frightfully unique. Operatic voices screamed chromatic scales. Neutrino static, he thought. Gamma and X-rays shrieking through me.
He drifted in space. Of course. Everything drifted through space—though all his life he had thought of himself as on a planet, insulated from space by the sky. The sky! The thought seemed risible. The so-called sky was actually just a film of mist on the Earth. It protected very little. But within that little existed this mind called Dirk. A point in itself, a weird simulacrum of the pith, the singularity of 5-space. Even here in this flying apart universe with its 3 X 1078 points—quark-groups, leptons, and gauge particles—the memory of oneness persisted in a pathetic thing called Dirk.
Billions of skull-locked minds like Dirk! The horror of those estrangements shook the alien consciousness free of its empathic bond with Earth’s biofield. Knots of galaxies sprawled as electric macramé in the darkness.
Galactic streamers coiled into seemingly endless emptiness. That emptiness held the truth of this radiant universe. Without it, there could be no radiance. Yet with it, darkness filled all absence, existence spent itself in waves, and each embrace was hollow.
Insideout despaired that it would never go home. It needed a new way to talk with Dirk. The known dead were too full of kindnesses and old loyalties. It needed to find another image in the vacuum field, someone more neutral. Biographies rushed up from Dirk’s recent classroom memories—Lincoln, Einstein, Shakespeare—
So many ghosts to choose from! So many bodiless minds!
There resided the alien’s real horror: It had gotten trapped in this disintegrating universe! The wholeness and timelessness of its 5-space home were lost, and now it had become only a wee, ephemeral whisper in an immense vacuum. It was disappearing!
No—not yet. That carryover fright from its bond with the humans still embroidered the alien with feelings from those many pulsing minds, and the pattern pressed a bewildering intaglio of sensations upon it: hungers for food, sex, and dreams while radiation chipped and frayed the genetic sequences and cell noise mounted to the cacophony of old age. And at any time an inanimate object could fall out of the sky and smash a skull into nothinged disorder.
So this was survival—making sense out of nonsense and finding hope in emptiness.
***
In blood-drumming darkness, Dirk waited. He was alone. The blood cusping through his heart thudded more loudly. The wild hope that the alien had gone gushed in him like a blowtorch, and he tried to rouse himself. But his muscles wouldn’t work. He remembered Chud and Ipo dragging him from the playground, and he struggled to wake up.
“Relax, Dirk,” a windy voice flapped in the blood-moaning silence.
The dark went smoky, and vaporous shadows sparkled with crystal flakes of light. D
irk sensed himself in the emptiness of an enormously vaulted space. Sparks flurried through the widening dark, and a human figure appeared ahead. When it walked out of its shadow, he recognized the domed forehead, long hair, and panda-sad eyes from the cover of his English Lit text. Edgar Allan Poe!
“You have every reason to be terrified,” Poe said in a lugubrious drawl, “yet I want you to remain calm.”
Dirk pushed with all his might to flee but remained immobile, hung like a wasp nest in the dream-space, busy with fear. Poe strolled closer, tilting drunkenly, and stood unsteadily before him, hands in the pockets of a long black coat buttoned to the throat of a disheveled neckband. His large, bloodshot eyes had filled with the starlight of tears.
“Who are you?” Dirk asked, even though the knowledge that this was the alien loomed in him.
“Insideout,” Poe said, and his forehead bulged and split like a popcorn, gray brain matter bursting forth in veiny lobes.
“Christ!” Dirk shouted. Transfixed by the nightmare, he watched unblinking as Poe’s husked brain dangled before him before withdrawing in a slug-slither back into the shell of his skull.
Poe bowed with courtly bearing that nearly collapsed into a drunken sprawl. He righted himself shakily. “Forgive me, please.” He put his trembling fingertips to his sweaty brow. “This is all so frustrating. But at least you know my story.”
“Yeah, you wanna go home. So why don’t you just get me outta here and we’ll hop to the Big Island?”
“I can’t help you.” Poe’s dolorous face wearied sadder. “My mind is weakening. The hyperfield is so far away, simply to stay alert requires supreme effort. I am reduced to a witness. All other effort is madness. I’m drunk with confusion. I thought you would be able to carry my full awareness—but I can only be with you partially. The rest of me is scattered hither and yon.”
“What’re you telling me? You can’t help me? These guys are gonna kill me! You understand that?”
“Too well now, I’m grieved to say.”
“Then do something! You’ve got an old Chinese guy juggling boulders. Give me some of that power.”
“I can’t. Don’t you see? I’m not all in one place.”
“That’s stupid. You’ve come from another world and you can’t even get it together to save yourself? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”
Poe’s pony eyes closed, and he slowly turned away. Insideout collapsed the dream. Direct communion proved impossible. The alien’s mind had refracted in 4-space into four parts, and the part it needed for empathic communicating waited in a French insane asylum.
Dirk drifted gratefully away from the alien’s influence and curled into the luggage of his body, half-asleep. The tread of his heart paced his fright. On one side of his dozing consciousness, the Judas Boys freighted his body to somewhere convenient for murder. On the other side, sleep ranged through darkness toward the slender gray light of a dream.
He shoved himself toward wakefulness and fell backward into the molten blackness of sleep.
***
Night broke into sabers of dawn. Jiang had been racing east for hours, and though he felt no fatigue, he was hungry. Darkness sank back into the Earth, and the terrain emerging from the dewy, lilac shadows was unfamiliar to him. A becalmed junk drifted in the Yangtze. Closer to the rocky shore, another junk turned as the men poled toward deeper water, and by that Jiang knew he would find a village nearby, since even on his village’s furious bend of the river junks often came to shore in the evening to trade their catches for village produce.
He willed himself slower, and the power in him dimmed away, leaving him small and slow-stepped among a stand of bristly pines alongside the rail tracks. With no station in sight, he stared through the scrawny trees in the direction opposite from where the junk poled away. Jiang noticed a wheel-rutted dirt path bending around a stony, weed-stubbled hill. He sauntered in that direction.
Beyond the hill appeared a one-street village of clay walls and mud-packed tile roofs. He approached it from the back, where the village had dumped the stones from their fields, and this reminded him of his own rackety hovel that faced the nightsoil fields on one side and a rocky lot on the other. Unhewed firewood and tangled sorghum stalks lay stacked between a pig sty and a chicken house, and tasseled rows of green corn grew in a field beside a tool shed. The verdant sheaves trembled lustrously in the morning breeze, spurting with birds hunting insects among the stalks.
Outside the bamboo wall of her courtyard, a woman in the black, baggy pants and padded jacket of all village women was winding plant fibers into twine by spinning a wood block dangling from a cord of vegetable string. The fragrance of steaming dumplings fluffed from behind the courtyard wall, quickening Jiang’s elderly stride.
“Good morning, young woman,” Jiang said. She was no young woman—her hair pulled back severely and knotted at the back of her head was clawed with gray—but she accepted the compliment by not contradicting him.
“Who are you, old man?” the woman asked, glancing up only briefly from her tedious spinning.
“A wanderer.” He lifted his face to the trees with their green tattered buds. The heart of spring had always been Jiang’s favorite season. Winter stilled life with cold; summer flaked rocks with heat; but spring brought rain in turbulent, immense mushrooms of hot air.
“There are no wanderers anymore.”
“I am a wanderer. And I’ve come from far away.”
“From the western hills to judge by your accent.”
“Indeed so, young woman. I am from the White Cabbage Village near the Yangtze Gorges. I have been traveling all night, and I am very hungry.” Carved into the lintel of the backdoor, the “tai chi” interlocked two fish that symbolized the cyclic flow of creation—a leftover from the ancient order before the “change of sky” brought the Communists.
“We have nothing for you here, old man. This village is too poor for handouts.”
“Handouts?” Jiang looked astonished. “I never accept handouts. I work for my food.” He slapped his chest to show his strength, and a smell like thunderstorms puffed off his gray, use-sheened jacket. “Perhaps I can work for you?”
The woman glanced up again from her spinning and shook her head at the sight of Jiang’s wizened face and broad but stooped shoulders. “You look like you were indeed strong once, old man. But now what could you do for me that my own grandfather could not do as well?”
“I am old, but I am not as enfeebled as you think. What work needs to be done?” He stared down the long gully of the main street and noticed in a glance the entire tapestry of the village’s work: A buffalo disconsolately pulled a plow in a field abutting the street; in the same field, barefoot children spred nightsoil with long-handled ladles; several women sat on their knees in front of their adobe houses pestling millet; naked toddlers played with twigs in a ditch; and a young man industriously repaired a mud wall that spring rains had hammered back into the Earth from which it had come. This crumbly village, so very much like his own, made him feel that he knew who lived in each of the battered houses.
The woman before him untied the newly made twine from the wood block that she had hung from the fibers and had spun to twist the filaments together. “My husband left before dawn to trade my pastries in the next village, and he had no time to finish his chores. Do you think you could chop firewood or untangle sorghum stalks or grind corn?”
Jiang slapped his hands together. “Prepare my breakfast, young woman,” he said with a cunning smile. “When it is ready, I will be done.”
“Done with what?” the woman asked derisively. “Your daydreaming?”
“Prepare the breakfast,” Jiang said more sternly and walked past her to the side of the house and the stacked logs by the animal pens. Jiang wasn’t sure what he could do, but the long night of running with the wind had convinced him that he could do anything he had to do. From here, out of sight of the street, no one would see the devilish power he intended to unleash. He bent over and put h
is hands under the top log. It was heavy. When he glanced over his shoulder, he spied the woman watching him with a skeptical frown. “Don’t you have work to do as well?” he asked.
She pursed her lips impatiently and walked behind her bamboo wall into her house.
As soon as she moved out of sight, Jiang imagined the large logs lifting into the air and shattering into splinters. Nothing happened. He willed the logs to stand up and burst apart. Again, nothing. He knit his brows with concentration, forcing his will into the grain of the wood and splitting the logs apart. Nothing at all happened.
Frustrated, he looked up to see the sun like a vast balloon rolling along the hills. “Where are you, demon?” he asked softly and turned toward the stack of sorghum stalks. The brittle stalks covered the ground in a hopeless tangle. Unmeshing them would take most of the day. In great detail, he imagined the whole stack flying into the air, scattering apart, and settling to earth in a neat pile. With clenched fists, he willed that this be so. His temples throbbed with the vigor of his intent, but the dry stalks sat inert as a stack of dry stalks.
Jiang paced impatiently past the stalks and firewood, past the pigs greedily feeding on their slop to the stone corn mill. The mill stood out in the open upon a circle of stamped earth beside the cornfield. In large wicker baskets, ears of corn waited to be husked and the kernels shucked. The mill itself, a crude grinding stone, lay flat on a column of fired clay bricks. Three wooden poles were lashed to the stone, and even with his full weight against one of the poles, Jiang could not budge the stone.
Arms outstretched, Jiang visualized his power streaming out of him and into the wicker baskets, yanking ears from their husks and kernels from their cobs: Cobs and husks danced into separate piles in his mind, and kernels whirled through the air and into the furiously spinning mill. His arms shook with the vividness of his wishful command, and a passing villager stopped to watch him.
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