Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  Sure, Dirk had thought and stayed hidden. He had the arc in his hand, its icy fire prickling his whole arm and thickening his courage.

  “Ipo stay dead, Dirk. Chud say you drop ‘em. No problem, foh shu-ah. He gone bad on you. Dat Ipo’s numbah. Dat his ting ovah Lani. She toll us plenny. So it ovah now, brah. We nevah gone stalk you. Unnerstan? Come on, we buy you one beah.”

  Dirk had kept still. If what they had said was true, he was glad; if not, no sense finding out now.

  “You go stay wit you head in dah sand,” the Judas Boys’ headman called. “Lani tru wit you, brah. Cuz you lolo. Heah me? You one crazy haole boy. I wen leave dis class ring of yours heah. Eh?” The voice trailed off, and Dirk heard the Judas Boys scuttling over the rocks back toward the beach’s parking lot. “Eh!” the gang leader called out again. “Chud still on you. He say he fine you, you dead. An he wit da mob now. Ass right. Doze Yakuza get one strong beef wit you.”

  Dirk had found his class ring on the boulder where the Judas Boys had left it: a red-stoned, brass knob of a ring, and he had given it to two other women besides Lani in the six months since he’d stolen it. For an instant, this reminiscence of his selfish past spurred him to throw the ring into the sea. But its unexpected return as a peace offering from the Judas Boys granted it emblematic significance. It had become lucky, and he pocketed it.

  Afterward, he sat on the beach remembering his life as it had been. Dawn budged him from his memories, and he recalled that Reena and Jiang were arriving today. He freshened up in the beach park’s public bathroom and took a bus to the airport to meet the woman he had seen in his visions.

  Morning cast a bronze shadow over the green mountains when he arrived. He stood before the arrivals monitor, trying to figure out which flight she’d be coming in on. “It’s the seven-thirty from L.A.,” Poe’s sullen voice said.

  “Where’ve you been?” Dirk asked to the air. He’d been reaching for the arc every few minutes since leaving the beach, hoping to get some clearer sense of what to do next. It frosted too cold to keep in his pocket, and he carried it in his duffel bag. Even through the thick material, he could feel the arc’s icy glow.

  “The less you hear from me, the less chance my energies will manifest as an orc.”

  “Fine,” Dirk said and walked off, heading toward the gate where Reena’s flight would arrive in an hour. “We’ll talk later.”

  “The trouble is this,” Poe’s glum voice went on. “Airport security noticed you when you walked in. The Home reported your abduction yesterday. The police have already been alerted.”

  Dirk spun on the balls of his feet and headed back toward the exit. A police officer appeared from around the pillars supporting the overhead rampway and stood waiting for him outside the automatic glass doors.

  “Don’t freak out now, Dirk,” Poe said. “The timelines that lead to my salvation lead you to jail. I’m sorry. Please, believe me. I didn’t want it to be this way. But if there’s going to be any hope for me, you must surrender.”

  Dirk backed up and cast a look around the pavilion. Two other security guards watched him from either end of the mall-like room.

  “Just turn myself in?” he asked, incredulously.

  No reply came. The automatic glass doors opened, and the police came for him.

  ***

  Howard’s greedy stare darkened all at once, and he twitched alert. The Yakuza had turned the tubelight off, and the warehouse went numb with darkness. The lit end of a cigarette floated in the dark, and its acrid smell sharpened the air.

  The skylight flung its stencil of crossed shadows on the concrete floor, and Howard peered up at the bitumen of night, searching for a sign. Fatigue stretched through him. His eyelids batted, and he slept.

  The red ash of the cigarette glowed hotter, and a glistening of blue fire smeared the watchful face in the dark.

  ***

  Reena, peaceful and determined, watched the Hawai’ian Islands appear out of the red smoke of the dawn sea. Her acceptance of Insideout and her own fate had allowed her to master the telepathy of their bond. The alien, weakened by the hour, could no longer be reached by thought alone. Even through lusk, it lurked far away and very quiet.

  As the blue shadowed islands turned below them and the giant yellow day swung its spokes among the jumbled clouds, Reena wondered how long her own clarity would last. The anguished thought of becoming again what she had been reminded her of the hospice. By now, dinnertime had begun in Avignon, and Yannick and the matrons had long before reported her missing to the police. They had already searched the forest around the asylum all the way up to the staggering pines on the ridge. They would search again tomorrow. After that, she would become for them one of the thousands that vanished tracelessly each year. Yannick would be troubled. After all, she had behaved differently just before disappearing. He would wonder, through the days of his life, what had happened to her, and each time, her mystery would turn him back on himself.

  That thought left her shamed and angry. A note explaining that she was well would have solved so much, she thought. She was grateful that she hadn’t revealed the alien’s telepathy to him, for that would only have haunted him more deeply. As the plane descended into the bright morning of her new life, she considered going to a phone and calling him. Insideout would have dissuaded her then if it could have reached her. She was looking back to an unrecoverable past. If she had turned her telepathy on herself then, the myths of her species would have warned her: The look back at Hell is itself the return journey.

  Reena had expected Dirk to meet her at the airport. No trace of him even glinted in the sluggish drone of the terminal’s mental noise. Flares of emotion went off around her as people called out to each other and were reunited. She drifted with the flow of people, distracted by their flashing thoughts. The image in her mind of Dirk was the alien’s idealized version, and she scanned the crowd for him, not realizing that there was no one like him in this world.

  At the sight of a wall of public phones, her concern for Yannick swirled up in her again. She took off her jacket and leaned against one of the metal-faced phones, knowing she could never return, feeling that he alone had been a friend to her and deserved more than silence. When she picked up the receiver, her uncertainty thinned away.

  Reena’s telepathy did not transmit over the telephone line, so she had to command a passerby to complete the call for her.

  “Doctor Lefebvre, I’m free,” she said when she heard him on the other end. “It’s all too wonderful”—and frightening, she thought—“for words.”

  “Reena, is that you?”

  “Yes, yes, Yannick, it’s me, Reena.” Her face flushed, and her eyes hurt to hear his voice. “Don’t worry about me. I’m healed.”

  “Reena, where are you?”

  “That doesn’t matter. I won’t be here long. I’m on my way to someplace wonderful.”

  “Please—tell me where you are. I must see you before you go.”

  “I’m already gone, Yannick. It’s too complicated to explain, but you must believe me. I’m happy and well. My mind is clear. I feel I could write a poem.”

  “Who are you with?”

  “I’m with friends,” she answered, imagining Dirk with his kestrel-clear eyes and the two others the alien had revealed to her, seen more vaguely. Anxiety about their whereabouts throbbed in her. “I just wanted you to know that I’m all right—and that I’m grateful for all the help you gave me. I’ll remember you, Yannick. Please, don’t worry about me.”

  She heard his breath ebb toward words, and she hung up. A chill soaked her. She was alone. The faces of Dirk, Howard, and Jiang, which had floated in and out of her mind during the trip, were nowhere to be seen. “Insideout?” she called. Nothing. She closed her eyes and tried to lusk. Soon, she found the vibrantly still presence within her. “Where are you?”

  “Here,” a frail voice spoke. “I think. I feel fuzzy.”

  She pressed the back of her head against the me
tal face of the phone and stared into the crisscrossings of people as the crowd from her flight thinned. “Where is Dirk?”

  “Isn’t he there? Ah—I forgot. The police have him.”

  Fear spiked. “The police?”

  “Reena,” Insideout said in a gasp of exhaustion, “you’ll have to free Dirk on your own. He has the arc.”

  “But how will I find him?”

  “The same way you’ll find the others. Use your mind. I’m pummeled to pemmican. Can’t talk anymore now. Oh—yes. Go to Jiang first. He needs you right away.”

  The alien could manage no more, and its last words yawed eerily with echoes. It dithered into silence.

  Reena hugged herself and listened for Insideout’s presence. It wasn’t there. It kept itself transparent, watching her watch for it, so that she found the alien as the minds of the others. Howard was the first one she heard within her, his voice throbbing like a jellyfish: “Time has no shores. Anything can happen.” He mumbled to himself, unaware of her. She saw him in her mind’s eye more sharply than the tall, sunny doorways that led out past the baggage claim to the street. He sat on the floor with his back up against a wall in a warehouse. Huge, airy shadows filled the empty space, and he stared into the volume of veiled light with nimble eyes, tracing the shapes of things she could not see.

  Reena walked with her head slung, listening deeper. Dirk was there, indistinct in the mauve shadows of his cell. She glimpsed sunrays slanting through a barred transom onto a gray wall where he flaked the paint with his thumbnail, spelling words she couldn’t read but understood by his thought: TENDER BENDER.

  Deeper, she found Jiang. He was almost wordless, near to lusk, and his silence carried her directly into his surroundings. She saw the deck of an ocean liner, water loud with sunlight, the black piers of a large harbor, and the stained hulls of other ships. She knew looking at this scene, from the buzzing mentations of those around Jiang, that this had to be Pearl Harbor. Fighting an upwelling of brilliant sensations from Jiang, the noises and sights around him, she found her way to a taxi and ordered it to Pearl.

  During the fifteen-minute cab ride, Reena watched the old Chinese man. Wrapped in a blanket, he smiled as two gleaming white sailors led him down a gangway to a squad car. A police officer and a plainclothes agent took Jiang from the sailors, and the officer put his hand on Jiang’s head as he ducked into the back seat. The old man was confused but accepting. She felt his fortuity, his gleeful awareness that he had found his way to Golden Mountain—and she felt his heart like a circle of light sweating shadow, fearing the demon that had carried him here. Strange are the ways, a thought flitted in him.

  In the middle of a busy street, the squad car with Jiang in it approached, and Reena used her mind to make the taxi driver cut it off. Tires screamed, and the police officer jolted from the squad car with pistol in hand. Reena stepped from the cab and told him to put his gun away. Jiang huddled in the back seat, watching her with amused eyes. Lifeforce spilled between them like the glow of cold rushing off a frozen pond.

  “Ni hau ma?” Reena asked aloud, mimicking the sound of what she wanted to say from the echo of her thought in Jiang’s mind.

  “Bien, à tout prendre,” he replied, astounded to feel his muscles seized by strange nerve impulses. He knew no French. Her telepathy lit his body.

  Reena told the plainclothesman beside Jiang to get out, and she commanded him and the taxi driver to forget her. Then she got into the back seat with Jiang and had the patrolman drive them to the police station.

  Insideout followed from the fringe of love and pain, from the pouring sunlight, from the space between Jiang’s callus-bossed fingers, from the moist creases of Reena’s elbows, from the invisible pit of forgotten words, from the nonsense of nothing. The alien, in that psychoid realm between mind and a white scream, saw what they all saw, each in their way—the future opening like a wound, paying out time in the shape of lives.

  In the oil-stained air of the car’s exhaust, tiny bestial feces writhed in the smoke, sparkling like confetti, swirling like the glues of an hallucination.

  ***

  Dirk busied himself chipping old paint from a wall the color of peppered eggs into a sign that signified love and will to him. TENDER BENDER he scratched, believing with that rhyme and without thought that love and will did not contradict each other. The irony of etching this on a prison wall did not occur to him. Actually, Dirk was barely conscious of his industrious fingernails. He listened to the diamond grindstone of heaven filling his head with sublime music as it crushed his questions to answers.

  The moony music tranquilized his anxiety about the arc. Its chill had gone out of it when the police picked him up, and when the cigar-gnawing detective at the station had gone through his bag, he barely looked at the blank medallion. Dirk had briefly considered telling the detective that in a few hours the metal wafer he had dismissed would disintegrate the whole island. But the dreamy elastic sounds in his head had nightmared to a shriek, and he had let that thought go. Instead, he asked the arc’s crafty noises to sing of other mysteries.

  He wondered about the blackbody of the cosmos and how it carried the light of all-time. He wondered about his father’s ghost. Mitch had never looked as real to him as he had in Insideout’s presence. Dreams and memories distorted the past, but Insideout had brought Mitch back exactly as he had looked in all his forgotten details. Infused with the alien’s mental strength, Dirk could see how the superstitions of the past had some grounding in actuality: Ghosts were obviously some kind of mental wave function, persisting in the photonic field, like lightwaves enduring in the vacuum, maybe even transmigrating by morphogenetic resonance with the antennae of DNA in the nucleus of a fertilized egg. I really don’t understand that, he thought—yet he did understand; limitless knowledge hummed around him like an ocean, touching all of him except the iceberg-tip of his self-awareness.

  His hands stopped flaking paint for a moment, and he replayed those crystalline notes in his memory, listening closely. Light patterns, bodies of energy, life fields migrated through the tesseract volume of the universe carrying consciousness endlessly through time. Consciousness spontaneously evolved across time in the form of lightwaves—cellular potentials, synaptic sparks—

  All life emitted light. Each molecule of DNA acted like a tiny laser: Its atomic vibrations, synchronized by its superordered structure, generated coherent light in ranges from ultraviolet to infrared and radio waves. This biolaserlight contained the uniquely precise information of that genetic molecule. And even though the signal was ultraweak, its information was not lost. The vacuum field carried all light, from the enormous first flash after the Big Bang to the feeble biophotons of single-cell organisms an inch underground. Light timelessly propagated through the ubiquitous vacuum. The patterns of information within the light, being weightless, endured forever – immortal.

  Some of the biolight was even reabsorbed by DNA similar to the DNA that first generated it. Each consciousness—plant, insect, or animal—propagated as a wave bundle that had been emitted and reabsorbed many times, evolving in the photonic field over many lifetimes. All life was graffiti—atomic graffiti scrawling patterns on the blackbody depths—molecular graffiti scribbling nucleotides into DNA patterns on the wall of the biopause. Who was writing? The question opened like a lion’s maw. The answer swallowed the beast: Implicit consciousness. Before the Big Bang, before the inflationary rush that swept the universe clear of monopoles, before the singularity, before the vacuum, was the empty set—the nothing. “The map is there,” Poe’s voice slurred. “Mind is there.”

  “What about Mitch?” Dirk asked, not really caring about cosmic limits. “Where’s my dad?” The crystal music chimed elusively. Where was the vacuum field that held the wave-wrack of all-time? Everywhere. But for Dirk everywhere was nowhere, because he lacked the power to tap it. Reena could talk with the dead and not even know how the dead endured. And Dirk, lightheaded with astonishment, understood but could n
ot commune with the wavefield in the abyss between his atoms.

  Now that he had begun to understand a little bit more about the universe around him, he could hardly believe that the world had ever seemed so dead that all he had wanted, without even knowing it, was to hurt it, to make it scream to life. Reality had suddenly come alive—new possibilities bloomed and the dreariness that had once owned him was gone.

  Dirk and the alien were gnattering like this when the police brought in Donnie Lopes. He was enraged. After word had reached the Home that Dirk had been picked up by the police at the airport, where he was presumably attempting to flee the state, Mr. Paawa conducted a thorough search of the Home, trying to find some clue to Dirk’s behavior. In Donnie’s locker, he found a car stereo and several digital wristwatches, and he called the police.

  “I’m telling you,” Donnie was practically shouting when they led him into the squad room, “that misfit Dirk stole all this stuff. He just makes me hold it. Am I culpable because I didn’t want to get maimed? Come on, use your heads—I’m not the guy you want.”

  Donnie stamped the floor with his aluminum cane while he and the officer escorting him waited for the wire mesh door leading to the detectives’ desk to unlock electrically. The anteroom with its walls of police posters stank with ammonia cleaner, and the bare, brash tubelight smeared away all shadows. The door buzzed, and they banged through it into a fluorescently lit room crowded with desks and the stale smells of cigarette smoke and coffee. Most of the desks were empty. A typewriter clattered at one desk, where a bald man gnawing a cigar finger-pecked a report. Near the mesh door, on a metal tabletop, lay Dirk’s duffel bag.

  “I know my rights,” Donnie told the bald, sallow-faced detective with the cigar when he rose from his typewriter and sauntered over to him. The police escort jerked his thumb at Donnie, rolled his eyeballs, and left.