Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  On the ride out into the desert, Howard lifted his face to the flexing stars and for the thirty-ninth time in the last five hours questioned what was happening to him. Every time he had wondered how he could see the future, he had drawn a blank. But this time, an answer offered itself.

  The sun-golden wastrel with eyes like chipped glass, whom he had seen before in his visions of Hawai’i, appeared in a sudden tangling of rainbows. “My name is Dirk,” the apparition said in a soundless voice. “I’m your friend. I guess I’m more like your work buddy. We’ve been brought together by an alien—some being from a world we can’t even imagine. This alien needs our help. Got that?”

  Howard gazed up from the headrest serene as a cobble in a streambed, cool desert air laving over his face. The ghost before him, like all the apparitions gazing backward from the future, arrived enameled in sun-gel, brighter than sight yet without the pressure of vision, as though had merely imagined the image. You’re different, Howard thought. You talk back.

  “I’m real,” Dirk assured him. “But our contact is slim. It won’t last long. Howard’s your name, right?”

  A querulous expression darkened Howard’s face. This was real – the answer to the why of his miracle winnings — the explanation for how he tasted the future. “An alien?” he asked aloud. “You’re kidding?’’

  “What’s that?” Tony asked. Howard looked looped to him, and that was all right. The money he had seen in the rube’s pockets made his state of mind very all right.

  “Nothing,” Howard responded. The vision of Dirk had been displaced by the plasm of stars suspended in the black night. He took out his silver pocket flask and swigged the sharp liquid.

  When he looked at Tony Robello, time’s lavings gleamed translucent with glimpses of himself leaning across a velvet green table and hugging a heap of cash. But when he faced the sky, time plunged into lightning-silent, radiant and jagged peeks at surf-smoking sea cliffs, green ocean, Dirk running across a cactus field sheathed in sunfire, and a horrid face—a mad-eyed, millipede-whiskered head with gnashing mandibles so viciously vivid that just staring at it used up minutes of his life.

  Howard hooted with fright at the abominable creature, and Tony swerved off the road and rooster-tailed gravel before righting the car.

  “Hey! What’s wrong?” Tony shouted.

  Howard clutched the dashboard and gazed bug-eyed through the windshield. One hand flapped toward his pocket and found the silver flask.

  “Keep your pink elephants to yourself, all right?” Tony grabbed Howard’s flask and took a swallow. “We’re almost there.”

  There was immediately here for Howard. Grateful to separate himself from the terrible being he had seen, he took back the flask, had another swig, and stared ahead at the road. He sat back in his seat and let time untangle its mesh of events before him. What could he do if an alien being invested its power in him? Was that monsterface? Why was it showing him the yet-to-be? Horror drilled deeper into him, and only time’s wildfire blotted the joyless implications of his vision.

  Tony took sullen Howard to a ranch home past a gatepost mounted with a coyote skull. From outside, the place looked ramshackle, sag-roofed, and blister planked, but inside the rooms were elegantly and expensively appointed with silk furniture and exotic potted plants. Llama skin rugs covered the slate floors, brushstroke erotic art hung on the walls, and large-screen TVs playing sex videos lighted darker backrooms.

  A sapphire breath of perfume made Howard turn toward a lissome young hooker in a fragile lace dress approaching him. Her angel-white hair feathered to bare shoulders, and her hips rocked as if walking up stairs. When he stared at her slinky shape, blind depths stymied his clairvoyance, and he knew there was no future for him there. He shrugged her hand off his arm and followed her into the playing room. He nodded politely at the crooked faces he remembered from his visions on the ride over and sat down at a round table matted with green velvet.

  In the raveling of time-currents across the table, Howard observed all possible outcomes of each game as the cards shuffled. Scenes shunted before him, shadowy voices muttered, cards fanned and flurried, all in a billowy hush, white-hot as a full moon, almost blurring natural sight. Sometimes it did blind him, and he had to think of his shoelaces or the Cubs blowing the playoffs for the World Series or Cora dancing in her underwear to find his way back behind his face. Fortunately, there was no dearth of alcohol at the ranch, and he drank enough for the hustlers to think him crosseyed. But behind his numb stare, Howard watched closely. By dawn, he had won another million.

  While he packed away the money into two shopping bags that the amused hooker provided, the timelines shifted: In a Guernica of flashforward glimpses, he benumbingly witnessed himself clubbed with the butt end of a forty-five by Tony Robello and dumped in the trunk of his red convertible. Images coalesced of his blood-gnarled body, sprawled under a saguaro with the music beaten from his limbs, and his eyes like oysters. He looked about the room at Tony and the other grim men that he had played with. They were all slouching, sulking, pondering what went wrong. Tony leaned at the window watching dawn’s yolk smear across the horizon. Howard glanced at the two doors of the playing room. Time tunnels appeared murky and torpid in all directions across the room except through one of those doors.

  Howard picked up his bags of money and casually walked through that door. It accessed a bathroom. He unzipped his fly and noisily relieved himself while he let his second sight survey the small room. Only the window had the bright clarion curves that swooped toward the future. He unlatched it, hoisted his money ahead of him, and crawled out.

  The future unwound into a narrow path of lucid timelight: A shining trail ran with strait efficiency across the weedy yard beside the ranch house to Tony’s red convertible. Electric smoke boiled everywhere else. Howard dashed with all his might down the blazing timeline and reached the car in a huff. The keys dangled in the ignition. He started the engine and rolled toward the highway and dawn’s green rags, and a voice shouted at him.

  “Hey, you with it?”

  Howard startled and turned to face Tony Robello behind the wheel. A chill of abrupt wakefulness seized him, and he realized that he had been dreaming forward. Ahead, at the side of the road, a gatepost mounted with a coyote’s skull appeared. Above, the night sky hung black as a skillet and greasy with stars.

  Window in the Blood

  Only what is lost is truly free.

  Reena Patai sat alone in the courtyard in the purple shadow of the chestnut tree, and she crossed herself when she heard those words. The voice came to her from nowhere—not from the anemic thoughts of the mad, which continued to chew her hearing with their baffled mutterings though midnight peaked over the dark asylum—and not from the night matron subvocalizing a paperback about a woman’s second chance at love. The voice was Satan’s own.

  With the other patients secure in their rooms at this hour, Reena had gotten out by wedging a piece of cardboard into the socket of her door’s latch to keep it from locking. She had used her telepathy to sneak past the matron and her staff, left the building through the open front door, and strolled into the courtyard. For an hour, she had sat silently, watching night fold its feathers, not-listening to the patients’ weeping terrors, thinking through the marvels of the day.

  After deep consideration, she concluded that her miraculous recovery (Yannick himself believed it impossible for the hippocampus to regenerate itself) indeed demonstrated the work of the Dark One. This was His world. She had heard that from the matrons time and again. There were no more holy miracles, because God had left this world to the demons. The matrons had told her this when she had asked them whether God could cure her sickness and make the stiff-jointed trances go away and help her think like other people. Don’t pray for miracles, they had said, pray for acceptance. God had pulled away in an infinite ebb that left the world empty of any sign of Her. Deep in the invisible, Her divine force mounted toward the world-smashing tidal blow of Ju
dgment Day.

  Of course the matrons had called God “Him”—but Reena had known from her trances that God was a Woman nailed to a Giant Tree: In the jolting agony of her trances, she had seen the Tree filling the night with the phosphorescence of the stars, and her pain had briefly converted to its opposite. Staring into the trillion-mile-high sky, she experienced a muscular pleasure, the stars’ contractions and the heavens’ great expansive release. (Many shaky-kneed, goose pimpled night fits passed before she heard about orgasms from one of the promiscuous old women in the laundry cellar and took in that this experience had a name.) After one intensely hurtful and pleasure-cored seizure, her nerves still splattering pain in needle-jab flinches, she had morosely flipped the pages of an encyclopedia and seen the Tree in the bloodways and sparkways of the body, arteries and nerves branchy as oaks. On another page, she recognized the Tree in the cradle of female hips, and with her lips tediously spelling out the caption she traced the birth tube as it twin-branched into Fallopian boughs and the fruit of generations. She understood then that her pain contributed to the root growth of the Tree in the mud of her flesh. Her screams furnished the wind in the branches. And God was life Herself nailed into the Tree by atoms, stretched over the emptiness by pain. Life was pain. It was okay. Death made it okay. The Mother gives and the Mother takes away.

  Reena had made her peace with the Mother then, and the magnetic winds drawing her from trance to trance, meal to meal, day to day, on toward the leaf fall freedom of death was the Mother’s sapforce. She went with it. The matrons were pleased with her (she ate better and complained less), and she was pleased with Her. That had been five years ago, when she was seventeen and wise. Now, at the end of her first tranceless, clearheaded day, she had gained clarity and lost her wisdom.

  Nothing was certain to her anymore. And by that she knew she moved in the shadow of the Dark One, breathing His confusion. The Mother gave life and life gave pain. She could plainly see that in everything that grew out of the dirt, bloomed into orgasm, and fell back into the dirt. Orgasm, chained in terror and hurt to the organism, was God’s one gift of pleasure to life, to everything strong enough to live to maturity. The rest belonged to suffering—growing pains and death throbs. Freedom from pain came from Satan, not God. So! she resolved herself and placed her attention firmly in her surroundings. Fireflies glinted over the sleeping flowers, and the air blew soft, starry, and fragrant with the dreams of the roses. Satan was approaching.

  What had He said to her? Only what is lost is truly free, she repeated. She had been lost all her life. Had she been free? Satan’s arrogance, she thought, staring up at the star-daubed sky. He’s given me wits in exchange for my soul.

  “Hey, it’s not that way at all!” Dirk’s voice bounded from the draggle of hedges at the wild end of the courtyard, and she jumped, “I’m really not the Devil.”

  Reena stared hard at those dense shadows, and a figure appeared. She gasped, though she could see nothing of Him but a tenebrous human shape. He walked nearer but did not step out of the shadows. “What do you want with me?” she asked out loud, tense with fright. The echo of her voice tripped through the black iron fence and into the dark hills.

  “Reena, I need your help.” Those words appeared in her head with a sound like a rush of wind.

  “What can I do for you?” she whispered, pulling her white sweater and green smock tighter about her.

  “I want you to leave the asylum,” the gusty voice said, and Reena thought she saw the amber of flesh in the darkness, the glint of eyes.

  “Leave?” Her hands fretted with a button. “Where are we going?”

  “To America.”

  “That’s not possible.” Her brain felt muscular with common sense. “I have no money. No passport.”

  “Anything you wish is possible now, Reena.” The shadow stepped closer, and shards of a face appeared—a fox-curve of brow, a pugnacious nose, small and snubbed like a bat’s, the flint of an eye. “I don’t have much time to explain. I wish I could stay with you moment by moment and guide you. But I’m lost myself. I’m going crazy in this maze of worldlines, trying to make sense of everything I’m touching. Everything is so new. I’m not sure if I’m coming or going. And I can be gone in an instant, so listen, please, listen. You not only can hear other people’s thinking, you can touch their thoughts. You can make them think—and believe—anything you want.”

  A look of frightened aversion trembled on her face. She wanted to shout the demon away, but before she could speak, the air flashed hotly, and the figure scorched to a retinal silhouette. Reena squinted, and as her numbed sight adjusted to the flaring brilliance she laid eyes on tiny barbed faces snapping before her. Fang-gnashing snouts spun at her like hornets. She screamed.

  The rat sneers burst into stardust, and she found herself alone again with the prophetic shadow. The bell of her scream rang in the hills, and shouts leaped from the dark rooms of the insane. She stood up, shaking with rage. “You are Satan!” she said with exultant conviction, and the reverberations of her fixed stare shook her whole body as if she were being electrocuted in slow jolts.

  “No,” the shadow almost stammered. “You don’t understand. These—demons are not mine. I mean they are but not really. Oh, how can I explain? I can’t control them anymore than you can control a sneezing fit. Please, don’t be scared.”

  Reena shivered with righteous wrath. Her vehemence confused the alien. Anger stymied its single-mindedness, and the continuum fractured into rheumatic branchings: Jiang jaunting faster than hawks over the ancient trails to a splashdown in a starlit ocean, Howard plundering timelines for treasure, Dirk absconded by killers. Wildness ached like a century of steerhood—cut into parts, blood drained into worldlines, body butchered into separate dimensions. The sacrifice was made in pain, and the alien felt what it was like to be human.

  Until that instant, Insideout had touched but not felt the minds of these almost mindless animals. It was a 5-space being arcing through 4-space, yes-out-of-mind, entranced by the soft-eared songs of the cetaceans, forced against its loathing to reach into the dim space of humanity.

  Waves crinkled the emptiness, meshing tighter as it entered deeper into the cellular narrows of their fisted brains. Only now did it fully regret that in its distraught urgency to manifest, it had disregarded the Earth’s curvature. It had acted instinctively as though it still dwelled in point-reality, and now its parts, separated by thousands of miles, lacked the strength to withdraw and try again. Its confusion swirled to a whirlwind.

  “Oh, dear, I’ve really bollixed this whole thing, haven’t I?” The shadow moaned, and its arms covered its head. “Dirk was right. I am stupid.”

  “You’re not Dirk?”

  “Heavens, no. I’ve used his shape in the past as a convenient appearance for your sake. To Dirk, I look like this.” The shadow stepped forward, and Poe appeared in the electric light, grievous-eyed and sallow. “This is a writer’s face from a schoolbook memory of Dirk’s. I thought it appropriate.”

  A chorus of howls and mooncurved cries from the asylum answered Reena’s scream. “I have no time to argue,” Poe implored. “In moments, the night watch and the matron will be here with flashlights, drugs, maybe shackles.”

  Poe stepped back into shadows. When the alien came forward a moment later, it manifested as Dirk, adding a few inches to his stature, softening his belligerent sneer, and brightening the light in his glass-splintered eyes to a butane blue angel stare.

  Reena gasped at the sight of him, and in her breath Insideout heard the withinside of wonder, the expansive release of hope and the acceptance of action. It jerked a thumb at the wands of light waving at the entrance of the courtyard and asked, “Will you stay here with them—or come with me?”

  She had only one question really, and in that squeezed moment she faced it: “Will I be damned?”

  Insideout had no answer for that, for all life was damned to die, even as in that damnation reposed its own blessing. It had
learned that with the blinking out of the dolphins’ bodies and the union of their light cones. Consciousness generated a pattern, like the shape of a fountain everchangingly the same, flow bonded to form, as change itself changed. “If you mean, will you be saved—I can only say no. No one is saved.”

  “But will I burn with you in Hell for eternity?”

  “Hell and Heaven are carried by each of us—now. And there is no eternity, my dear. Not in this universe.”

  The strength went out of her knees, and she sat down. “Then I will burn in Hell.” She lifted her face to the sky and shrieked: “I will burn!” And then softer, “For the Devil always lies.”

  Footsteps came running over the cobbles, and the beams of flashlights swung across the hedges. Shouts caromed from windows as patients banged against the screened bars.

  “This is no lie,” Insideout told her. “If you stay here, they will lock you up and drug you. If you come with me, I promise you will understand. Listen.” It held a hand to the side of her head, and its touch was bright as ice. “The voices are gone.”

  Reena’s mind went clear. The ogreish voices were gone.

  A flashlight blinded her. “Here she is!” the matron’s voice called.

  The night watchman grunted from the other side of the courtyard, and his lightbeam swung toward them over the serrated shapes of the flower garden.

  “Why are you out here?” the matron asked, keeping the glare of her light in Reena’s face. “It’s sleeptime now.”

  Reena looked away from the light and eyed the cobbled path of the garden curving through the darkness and out of the courtyard. Dirk stood there, watching her. He was handsome and tall as a prince, his hair tiger-streaked, and his eyes fixed on her with soulful urging.

  “He may be Satan,” she told the befuddled matron as the woman grabbed her by her arm, “but here I am in Hell.” She got to her feet and said firmly, “Let me go!” The inside of her head flexed as though her brain were sinewed, and the matron’s grip relented.