Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  For the next half day, she sat and listened inwardly for Insideout. The musings of those around her were all heard before, but the rainbow-colored thoughts within her offered strange sensations compelling as an atonal nocturne. She cleared herself of thoughts, which she had learned to do simply by trying. When she heard the blood in her ears, she stared at the emptiness within her, waiting for the alien to appear.

  What did she expect Insideout to say? Why it had gone away? How it had come back? It couldn’t even tell her how it had come to this fragmentation blast she called a universe.

  The answer to that resided somewhere. All knowledge was sealed like a fossil in spacetime. Insideout, too, wanted to know exactly how it had come to this frightening place. But time had narrowed too much for its brain to go through the analyses that would bring that knowledge forward. And what good would it have done the alien? Some riddles become mystery just because there isn’t enough time to think them through. Indeed, time steamed away, and with it Insideout’s strength. Most of its energy was spent sustaining its brain away from the hyperfield and buffering the remorseless pain of the decaying fields in the titanohematite matrix.

  Insideout showed Reena what it was doing. It let her telepathy penetrate it, hoping she would understand. With what little power it had left it reached out to the humans. Yet even in its impuissance, it proved too strong for them. Its most simplistic effort required four of their brains and bodies. Why? Was that somehow related to the coldness of this cosmos, which had frozen energy into four separate forces in four narrow dimensions? Why me? it wondered. What was this me that always seemed to be the center? Was it not the pith itself shattered into countless lives across the whole universe? The woe in that thought blew a bassoon-note of despair across its being. Strange are the ways. The alien marveled that any self-awareness had evolved in such dimwitted brains so firmly entrained to furious bodies.

  “I am an oaf,” Insideout said miserably, its voice childishly genderless. “I don’t belong in this wild place. I’ll never make any sense to you. Why do you try to understand me?”

  “It would help, I think. People like to understand.”

  “My home is the pith. My center is the infinity of collapse. But that’s meaningless to you. It’s like—I—oh, it’s all so different!” Its petulance sparkled a little in the dark of Reena’s closed eyes. “How can I tell you when there are no words?”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Heaven,” the alien responded without hesitation. “An effortless experience.” It thought deeper, and its brain found a kinder word for that in the tenuous waveforms of forgotten words whispering among the separating photons of the past: “Lusk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not lust, my dear. Lusk. It’s an archaic English word I found in Dirk’s verbal unconscious. It sounds simpler than yes-out-of-mind. That’s my best translation for the click and whistle phrase my cetacean friends use.”

  “Yes-out-of-mind,” Reena echoed.

  “Lusk is handier. It means the same thing, you know. The primal affirmation of oneness beyond thought. The spell of wholeness. Your ancestors didn’t think much of it. To them it was a kind of sloth—a sin. But what can we expect from the great-grandchildren of the rat? Humans are never satisfied unless they’re toiling. But to stay close to me, you have to be languid. Lazy. Lusk.”

  Reena communed deeper. The Asian, Jiang, came closest to acknowledging yes-out-of-mind in his occasional imitations of his grandfather’s Taoist meditations. But the brutal effort of his life to survive the aggressions of his fellow creatures allied him more with his rat ancestors than his meditative ones. Dirk and Howard had no meditative ancestors at all. And Reena existed as a casualty of the exploding universe, her brain broken into distracted selves by the violence of chance. Lusk was meaningless to her many parts.

  “What more can I tell you? You see now, don’t you? I have nothing to offer you of my world. What can you do with yes-out-of-mind?

  “It’s a way to be with you, isn’t it?” Reena asked. “Lusk is how I just reached you. I stilled all my thoughts—and I found you.”

  “Yes, I see.” The alien resonated, amazed. “You’re right. Lusk may be useful to us. I wonder if the others will be able to still themselves as deeply.”

  “If they have to, they will.” Reena, elated with her communion with the alien, demanded, “Tell me more.”

  “About what?”

  “You. The universe. Anything.”

  Groping for a response to Reena’s patient attentiveness, Insideout touched on thoughts close to the edge of her comprehension. One thought in particular fascinated her—the closed timelike line of her universe, the path of spacetime from its origin to its return on itself: Creation. Of course, the alien realized. After all the palaver the matrons in the asylum had fed her about God, she would be eager to see the Creation.

  Insideout amplified that thought for her. The limitations of her brain didn’t allow it to display anything mentally beyond the zero mass surface of the point from which the Big Bang began; so, it couldn’t show her its world or even the multiverse that connects all worlds. But she readily grasped the dramatic visualization of 4-space emergence: First—nothing. Then, from nothing, everything leaping out of 5-space, like Insideout, in an arc of energy, sphering out from the one point of the singularity and ballooning into the gaseous, fire-filamented, spark-whorling bloom of the universe.

  “Soon enough,” Insideout said to her in its weightless voice, “it will stop ballooning and begin to fall back in on itself. Eventually, it will collapse into the singularity and disappear. All vectors will have canceled. All mass and energy will have been conserved. Do you understand? Have you any idea what I’m telling you? Everything that is now—all people, cities, nations, stars, and galaxies are really ghosts. Truly a dream. Ultimately nothing. The whole universe is a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum.”

  Reena lost herself in the alien’s mind-video. At the end of it, she had exhausted hours of her attention and had already arrived in New York. The import of that, which would have stunned her with delight at any other lucid time, seemed insignificant now. On the flight to L.A., she wanted to know, “If the universe is just a big balloon of energy blowing up out of nothing and dropping back into nothing, then what is it in? What’s surrounding it?”

  “Nothing,” Insideout told her. “The universe is embedded in a true vacuum. This vacuum is forever. And because it is infinite, there are fluctuations of energy in every range, some as vast and complex as this universe. I come from one such fluctuation. But my universe has no future or past. I mean, from here, my home looks like magic. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s real. It’s a real place, with no meanings there but itself. No cruelties trying to be kind. No mystery hiding in riddles. And, best of all, no death.”

  “How?” Reena squirmed, trying to comprehend. “How can that be?”

  “My universe is just another fluctuation, like yours. Another throw of the dice. And like your world, it makes sense only to itself.”

  “And you’ll take me there with you when you go?”

  “I’ll take you. But not there. You wouldn’t fit. It’s a universe big enough for only one mind.”

  ***

  Corrugated white light rippled the air. Howard sat at a formica-top table shuffling cards. Tony Robello and two of the Yakuza who had kidnapped him sat with him, playing poker. They were one ripple of the corrugation. Across the empty, shadow-strewn span of the vacant warehouse another corrugation rippled where a thug talked on the phone they had patched in to a passing telephone cable. A mile away, at the harbor where he had left Dirk, the boy had gone. It was almost night. Through the fluorescently lit wall of the warehouse, Howard’s timegaze could see the molasses sky over the marina’s boatlights and rigging, and he could hear the sluggish drone of traffic on the adjacent highway. Farther west yet, the next warp of dream-seen light covered the Pearl Harbor anchorage, where a luxury liner would dock the next morning
. Gazing into the pearly texture of that vision, Howard could already see the next morning’s sunlight slippery on the bay water and the liner tied off to its stage. Stepping down the gangway, among chic couples and sunbossed travelers, strode an old man with a long silver mustache and chin whiskers. Wrapped in a blanket and bareheaded, he gawked about, tufts of white hair glowing like smoke from his smiling face. Two police officers waited for him on the dock.

  “Enough with the shuffling already,” Tony said, thumping his knuckle on the formica. “Deal the cards.”

  Howard turned his timegaze to the table. Close up like this, his perception of the future became hazier. He could see a granite glow to the game he had shuffled. It would never be played. He shrugged and lay the deck on the table to be cut. As Tony reached for it, the man on the phone hung up, and Tony sat back to hear what he had to say.

  The Yakuza stepped to the table and spoke to the others in Japanese. The one on Tony’s right translated: “His wife is not in the hotel. She checked out after we took him.”

  “I told you guys,” Howard mumbled. “My wife skipped with the money. She doesn’t care what you do with me.”

  Tony dismissed his lie with a nah-look. “The kid he was with musta tipped her off. It’s been three hours now. Where’s the make on that guy?”

  “The photograph you took is still circulating among the gangs,” the Yakuza explained in his fluent English. “If he was a gang member, as you think, we will find him.”

  “As I think.” Tony rolled his eyes. “The kid was a street fighter. In this hick town, every gang must have seen him before.” He picked up the cards and began shuffling them.

  “Do you still pretend you don’t know him?” the Yakuza asked Howard with a subzero stare.

  “If I’d known you guys were on my tail, I wouldn’t have hired a street kid. I’d have gone to the police.” He pointed to the table. “That was my deal.”

  “Then who is he?” the thug asked.

  “A kid. I told you. I met him at the airport. He seemed to know his way around. He found us a good hotel. And he had a friend who let me joyride his boat.”

  “Yeah, for which you paid ten grand,” Tony pointed out and began dealing.

  “Hell, I can afford to be generous. That’s why I’m here, right?”

  Tony threw the cards down and thumped the table. The Japanese remained motionless. But Howard, even though he had seen the gesture in the future moments before it happened, jumped. “Somethin’s screwy here, Dyckson. You ripped us off back in Vegas, didn’t you?”

  The timelines trembled. A scream like bending iron drifted through him from across a great distance. Anything could happen. “How could I rip you off?” Howard asked. “It was your setup, your cards, your players. What could I do? Read the future?”

  Tony bit his thumb and sat back. “I’m in trouble because of you, asshole. The boys in Vegas think I used you to burn them. If it wasn’t for my island friends here, I’d be dead now. You hear me? I’m bringing back their money, or I can’t show my face in this hemisphere again. Now you know that. So why do you keep feeding me lines? You want ugly? You don’t think these fellas know how to get ugly?”

  “Tony, I was lucky that night in Vegas.” Howard lay his hands face up on the table in exasperation. “You saw me at the tables. I was rolling.”

  “Sure. But the odds against beating our fix were astronomical.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “Yeah, Dyckson, but it was bad luck.”

  “You can have the money back. I’ve been telling you that since we got here.”

  “Then where’s the money?”

  “I can’t help it if I can’t find my wife.”

  “Well, I hope you like this decor, because you’re here until we collect. And not just my money—”

  “I know, I know. These guys are in for a cut of the lottery winnings. You think going over and over it like this is going to make it happen faster?”

  “If your wife doesn’t answer our messages at the hotel soon, we’ll start sending your fingers.”

  Howard covered his face with his hands. Was he dreaming this? They had had this conversation so many times, he wasn’t sure. A white rose flourished in the blackness of his shut eyes. A time node crystalized, here and now, the photon-cut silence of spacetime opening its jewel. A whale’s dripping eye watched him from the rose’s center. That was the alien Dirk had told him about, he was certain. The rose fluttered with time’s wingbeat. He tried to push his vision forward, to see what was going to happen to him. But the wraith-rose showed nothing but the round, little eye.

  A pounding boomed from the iron door at the far end of the hollow building. Howard dropped his hands and watched two of the Yakuza rush to the door. As they ran, their motion-shadows brittled into a crystal sheeting of luminous time scenes. The door opening, the Yakuza guiding in a hulking man with a cobra-sheath neck, bald head, bonesunk eyes.

  Time slipped back into gear. Howard blinked and observed the glint of savagery in the huge man’s iron stare.

  “His name is Chud,” the Yakuza told Tony. “He’s one of our local contacts. He knows the kid.”

  “What’s the kid’s name?” Tony asked with gleeful solemnity.

  “Dirk Heiser.” Chud looked at Howard and the Yakuza with ghastly vehemence. “He killed my partner. Now I want to kill him.”

  “Where can we find him?”

  “The Judas Boys are looking for him now. They know his hideouts. When they find him, they’ll call us here.”

  “Fine.” Tony began gathering the cards. Timelines became rubbery again, and Howard witnessed more card games in the transparent hallways of his timesight. Tony stared up into the underbrow darkness of Chud’s face. “Seven-stud high-low?”

  ***

  Cora had spent hours answering questions for the police. They had put a trace on the phone messages being left at the hotel where she and Howard had first checked in, but that had led to a different payphone each time. Cora wanted to pay the two million dollars that the messages demanded for Howard’s release. The police had other ideas. They had her leave a message at the desk that she was willing to pay for his release but wanted to speak with him first. An hour later, the message came that her request presenteds too much risk. An envelope with conclusive proof was to be picked up under a streetcorner newspaper box. With a discreet police escort, she went out and retrieved the large manila envelope. She opened it with fright numb fingers and found Howard’s orange swimtrunks and a small white envelope with the wire-red whiskers of his mustache.

  The message waiting for her at the first hotel’s switch-board instructed her to leave the suitcase of money at a wastebasket near the entrance to a nearby beach park. The police had her respond that she was too scared to go out at night. The final message required that the cash be dropped off at the wastebasket by eight the next morning.

  When the police left, they took the money and posted a watch in the adjacent apartment with the adjoining door unlocked. Cora sat on the balcony and in the lunatic agitation of her fright began counting stars. An unfathomable night lay before her.

  Howard watched his wife. He had found a way to peer through the corrugated light and see her. The view belled as if seen in a glass bowl. And it was fleeting. She smiled at him from the spring he had asked her to marry him, she scowled at him from the night he ripped her fancy dress in the car door. She sat on the balcony counting stars and weeping. The vision tattered to scraps of other scenes: The smiling old man in the blanket, the blonde lemur-eyed girl, Dirk scramming over black, jagged rocks.

  Howard plucked at his shorn lip, and these tattered glimpses vanished. He sat on the concrete floor in the baggy blue serge trousers Tony had given him. All lights but the one over him had been turned out. A Yakuza watched him from where he sat in the dark by the formica-topped table. That was the gangster who had shaved him with a sharp knife and no lather or even water. Howard’s scraped nerves burned. But then he put his mind on the timelines t
hat constantly fringed his sight, and the hurt disappeared. He studied the simmering of shadows around actual objects, and he realized with expansive relief that no torment could reach him here. The Yakuza seemed to sense that, too, for after that they made no effort to hurt him.

  Sleep, he commanded himself, but he couldn’t remember sleep. He thought about Cora and the danger confronting her. He hadn’t asked for any of this—not the money or the grief—yet a spate of guilt boggled him. If he could have changed everything back to the way it had been in Peoria by handing over the money, he would have. The futility of his remorse was apparent in the hovering timelines. At the hem of his sight, watery ripple shadows came and went. By relaxing his gaze, he could see into them to patches of lucidity, lenses peering ahead. He had gotten good with his sense of yet-to-be. If he could put aside his anxiety about Cora long enough, he knew he could find his way through this maze of clipped scenes back to her. He wanted to see that she was all right.

  He stared up at the tubelight dangling from the girders, and the brightness tightened his irises. When he looked back into the darkness, peripheral sight scintillated like the sweat on a jazzman’s brow. One twinkle flared into a view of Dirk at the airport. The edges of the vision ruffled away, and Howard’s mind moved inside Dirk. His heart muttered its mantra, his thoughts curled on themselves.

  ***

  Dirk waited for Reena. The night on Sandy Beach had been empty of threat, except for a pack of Judas Boys who came clattering over the boulders around 3 AM. Dirk had dodged among the tide pools and grass-shaggy dunes, keeping out of sight. They shouted his name. “Eh, no trouble,” a kid called out, whom he recognized: Lani’s brother, the Judas Boys’ headman. “No get your BVDees in one twiss, brah. We jess wanna make talk.”