Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  ***

  On the flight back to Honolulu, the class chaperone sternly reprimanded Dirk for pushing Donnie Lopes down a lava slope, and he had to sit in the front row of the plane facing an airlines ad with the vice-principal and without a window to stare out of. He fell asleep. While he slept, the disc in his pocket hummed at a pitch far above human hearing, and he dreamed that his father sat next to him. An orphan’s dream, he acknowledged right away, and in a fitful lurch of lucid dreaming, he tried to wake up. His body didn’t respond.

  “Relax, son,” his father said. A bear of a man, the Marine staff sergeant with razor blue eyes, dented chin, and prizefighter’s brow declared, “This isn’t a dream.”

  “Come on, Mitch!” Dirk barked as he usually did when the yearning dreams wouldn’t break off. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead twelve years.”

  “That’s right,” the thick-armed man agreed. He wore camouflage fatigues and combat boots. Remnants of green and black war paint smudged his cheeks and buzzcut hairline. “Shrapnel severed my aorta and I was zipped in a bodybag and flown home to Indiana. Twelve years ago. Twelve easy years. Until you picked up the arc.”

  “You mean this thing?” He took the silver disc out of his thigh pouch, amazed at the lucidity of the dream. “Donnie Lopes picked it up.”

  “You took it.” His gruff features looked wrung, sad as a hound.

  “So what? What’s the problem?”

  “You’re holding an arc.”

  “You mean like Noah?”

  “No. I mean like electric arc.” Concern smoothed his father’s voice: “Dirk, you’re holding a live wire. That silver disc isn’t an object. It’s a force, like electricity—only a lot stronger. Unless you return it to exactly where you found it, a lot of people, including you, will be killed. The whole island is in danger.”

  “Oh, Christ. Why am I dreaming this?”

  “You’re not dreaming it. This is real.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  “I told you already, I am dead. I was killed by a landmine. But the arc brought be back.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It must seem that way to you.”

  “What’d ya expect? This is crazy.”

  “Just think this over when your body fits again. There’ll be signs soon enough, and you’ll see I’m right.”

  Dirk took a moment to assure himself that this was a dream. He reminded himself that he had dozed off, next to the vice-principal, on his way back to O’ahu. “Why you?” he asked the ghost. “What’s really going on here? What kind of signs are you talking about?”

  The sergeant sighed and sat back deeply in his seat. He ran a blunt-fingered hand over his weatherworn face, and a tear glinted in the corner of one eye. Dirk flinched with the anxiety that his father might ask about Mady, Dirk’s mom. Instead, the silence thickened.

  Finally: “I knew you wouldn’t understand.” He shrugged his hands. “Who would? I can’t help you.”

  Dirk’s incredulity wavered. “Hey, just tell me what’s really happening.”

  His father regarded at him with woeful eyes, all the more terrible in his tough face. “The silver disc you’re holding is an arc between dimensions. It connects this world with a reality completely foreign to us. It must be returned to the precise coordinates where it appeared.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s where its home is. The dimension it comes from is smaller than anything you can imagine, son. Smaller than an atom. You’ve just moved the arc a universe away from itself. And if you don’t return it, it’ll explode with a force that will make a hydrogen bomb look puny.”

  Dirk stared deeply into his father’s face and recognized the strength in his features from every lovelong memory he had of the man. “Why didn’t you tell me this back there?”

  “I couldn’t. The arc is too big for one mind.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “There are others, other people the arc had to touch in order to talk with you here.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you really my dad or what? Are you some kind of alien?”

  “I’m not an alien,” his father responded in a rueful tone. “You are, Dirk. As long as you’re holding the arc, you’re in its field of influence.”

  “Then why don’t I just dump it?”

  “That would be stupid.” Anger flashed in his voice. “I told you—it’s going to explode unless you return it.” He turned away again, and the air faceted around him, flashing to bezels of blue fire. His father looked surprised and stared at Dirk with hurt alarm. “Stay alert now, son.”

  His last word taffy-stretched into a sixty-cycle hum as his body solarized to a spectral outline, the keyhole shape of a sitting man, seething with light. And the whole dream zoomed into his brightness.

  Insideout decided that attempted to communicate with this organism was futile. Pain wracked the titanohematite brain. As the arc moved farther from its hyperfield, the ripping hurt intensified. In its desperation, Insideout had used one of the disembodied light cones in the vacuum field about Dirk: the waveform of Dirk’s father. Free of three-dimensional limits, the ghost was easy to communicate with in 4-space. But getting the ghost to convey clearly the alien’s message turned out to be much harder: The emotions between father and son befuddled Insideout’s intent.

  After the light cone’s apparition in Dirk’s brain disappeared, Insideout attempted to speak with him directly. Unfortunately, within the tesseract range, time prismed language in odd ways, and when the alien’s anguished voice spoke from the glare of the dream it said: “Myn herte is sore afright! Help me, Dirk. Stille thy mind. Lusk fer me. I am no false dissimilour. I am no heigh imaginacioun. I am y-fallen from mine own soveryn werld. Alle I ask in felawshipe is lusk.”

  The brightness of dreamlight dulled to a color like cold cement, and Dirk fell asleep.

  ***

  To speak with Dirk, Insideout needed three other humans to carry the spillover of its 5-space consciousness. The clawing pain of its sudden separation from the hyperfield had kept the alien from focusing on these three, and it had manifested among them unconsciously. Once its brains pain-buffers began to come on, though, it looked about to see where it was.

  The human tesseract range revealed a landscape of fire. Unlike the cetacean tesseract, where light cones converged to the one beacon-light of the species, the human light cones wheeled against black infinity as a cyclone of individual waveforms. Insideout’s 5-space mind touched the clustering whorl of humanlight in four separate places. Reluctant to let go of Dirk, it took him along when it focused its awareness on the three other humans it touched.

  Dirk dreamed that he soared around the world, arms and legs spread over a ball of wind. The Earth spun below, huge and feathery blue. The ball of wind plummeted, flashing through clouds, blurring to a lightningstroke dive—and, with a bone-stunning jerk, bouncing off the ground. He zipped up through clouds, past the blue tatters of the upper atmosphere, and toward a blizzard of stars. He plunged again, slower, and he ogled cities and highways strung among green hills before he streaked to the ground and bounced back into the clouds.

  On the third fall to Earth, the ball of wind carrying Dirk dropped slowly enough for him to discern sharply where he was: A mighty brown river looped through craggy terrain, and glossy green fields of rice patchworked the lowlands. Water buffalo and barefoot, straw-hatted farmers trudged in river mud, dragging plows. A village of dried mud and reed roofs peeked from among river hewn hills.

  Asia, Dirk thought, and his self-awareness slowed the dream even more. He glided over hills of yellowed trees and bamboo-thick gorges and circled down toward the snug village.

  “Demons!” the old woman squawked. A bent, iron-haired Asian woman with a face like a shucked pecan hobbled quickly up a dirt road, past stone houses with reed roofs. “Demons!” she repeated. She led a militiaman, a skinny youth in sand-brown shirt and trousers with a leather belt, black slippers, and a militiaman’s cap bearing a red st
ar above the bill. He followed at a leisurely pace while the crone hobbled up the dusty, sloping road, past the communal vegetable patch, toward a grove of shimmering poplar trees.

  At the grove, the militiaman went rigid, and alertness jumped to his face. A lattice pyramid made of boulders, rocks, and pebbles rose majestically above the stone-littered field beyond the trees. He closed his eyes and looked again. Right before him, where a few hours earlier there had been an empty field, sat the perfectly exact joints of a pyramid with a sizable boulder at the apex. The rough rocks poised on each other so precisely that the shape of the pyramid seemed as though it had to be supported by iron rods.

  The old woman muttered, “It’s demons,” and shuffled backward into the trees.

  The militiaman stepped closer, head craning to take in the wonder, which reached as high as the tree crowns. Birds alighted on the rock-balanced vertices and glided through the empty faces. He walked around one of the slanted rock columns and then timorously lifted a hand and touched a stone.

  The pyramid collapsed in a brattling avalanche that sent rock chips flying. The militiaman ran into the trees with arms over his head, and the old woman threw her hands into the air and cried: “I told you! Demons!”

  When the militiaman looked back, rocks lay strewn across the field, no different than any other stony lot. He stared at the empty field with eyes like dice dots and then at the crone. They scurried back down the hill, never noticing the elderly man with beard and hair like cobwebs and merry eyes who watched them from among the trees.

  Jiang was older than the crone who had brought the militiaman to see his handiwork. The gods had cursed him to outlive his family, who had all been lost in the wars of the century: The civil war took his firstborn, the Japanese invasion deprived him of his daughters, the Communist victory killed his wife and their one son, and he hadn’t seen his grandchildren in the ten years since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the village they called him the War Sage, for he had given so much to the jaws of history he had to have grown wise on his losses. In fact, he had only grown tired.

  Jiang lived alone in his hut at the end of the village near the night soil ditches. He no longer minded the smell, and the flowers and dragonflies thrived more profusely here. His place seemed appropriate to him, because he had no skills to serve the village except his strength, which had thinned like smoke since he lost his grandchildren. He felt like refuse, everyone else in the village worked so industriously. His most strenuous job was to gather small rocks to repair the village fences. Most days, he just sat in the poplar grove stripping and splitting reeds the villagers brought from the marshes for use on their roofs. Oftentimes, his weak hands barely had the strength to do that, and he lay back in the tremulous shadows and dozed.

  Today his bones had been damp with weariness, and while he slept he dreamt that the village needed many rocks to partition a new field. But he couldn’t move from where he lay. A gray, old mouse, he couldn’t budge from where the grass-matted tree roots cupped him kindly. Instead, the stones moved. When he looked at them, they jumped like toads. His blood whispered, Sleep, and he couldn’t move, but the rocks sang in his head: “Each of us once was a star!” and when he looked at them they twitched. In the dream, he made the stones hop on to each other, thinking to make a pile. The stones hopped and clattered, sticking together like dough, until they had stacked themselves in four great columns higher than the trees. The columns leaned in toward each other, and he thought they were going to collapse. Instead their tops clunked together and stopped, forming a pyramid of air with stone edges.

  Jiang had flickered awake, shivering still from the remarkable clarity of his dream. And there was the pyramid! His heart kicked, and he jolted alert, leaning forward with the cocked hammer stillness of a lizard. At that moment, he heard the crone, the busybody with so many grandchildren she had nothing better to do than meander through the village spying and gossiping. She shouted about demons and leading one of the young soldiers to Jiang’s field. That was when Jiang understood that his dream was real, and he almost soiled his pants. What was going on? Sorcery? Demons? He had always scoffed at such notions—yet, here was proof of the miraculous.

  After the crone and the soldier left, he looked at an ankle-sized rock and willed it into the air. It bobbed up like a fisherman’s float and spun gracefully before him. He dropped it at once and leaped back like a firestung monkey. Dreadfully, he tried again. He concentrated on a larger rock, willing it to rise—and it shot into the treetops like a kite.

  Mind whirling with astonishment, Jiang lowered the boulder. A smile lifted through the heaviness of his face for the first time in many years, and he brought his trembling hands together in amazement and humble acceptance. Stones indeed carried the memories of stars, filled with light in their depths, swirling with light in their cores, like dark wells too deep to sparkle.

  ***

  “She’s changed, Doctor Lefebvre,” the matron said. “She’s fully alert now—and she’s asking for you.” The matron, a stout woman with a robust physical stature emblematic of her psychic fortitude, had faced down with her stern eyes every kind of madness over the last thirty years, and if she said that the girl had changed, it had to be true. But how could that be? The girl had been diagnosed a congenital schizophrenic: She had a biogenic disorder of her hippocampus—an irreversible somatic brain dysfunction.

  “Where is she now?” Dr. Lefebvre asked. He sat at his cluttered desk in his cramped, windowless office. He had been filling out medication schedules for his thirty-two patients when the matron came in and announced that the girl’s catatonia had lifted. The digital clock on his file cabinet blinked to 5:32 A.M.—less than half an hour before his morning rounds began—and he still had numerous forms to complete.

  “She’s in the east courtyard,” the matron replied. “She wants to see the sunrise.”

  Dr. Lefebvre put his pen down and stood up. This narrow-bodied man with black mane prematurely gray at the temples, thick nose, dim chin, and tristful eyes muttered to himself, “This is unbelievable.” He donned his white, knee-length medical coat and touched the knot of his tie to be sure he had remembered to put it on. “I must see her at once. Will you begin my rounds if I’m delayed?”

  “Of course.” She followed him out of the office and at the door took his arm in her sturdy grip. “Is it possible she has been misdiagnosed all these years?”

  Dr. Lefebvre stared into the matron’s broad face with a mystified frown. “If so, then maybe we’re the crazy ones.”

  The girl waited in the courtyard as the matron had said. She sat on a stone bench whose side was graven with letters worn by a century of weather: Avignon Hospice d’ Alienes. An old-style gas lamp fitted for electricity cast a wan luminance over the courtyard, illuminating a cobbled path bordered by a mesh of flowers—puss willows, primrose, spurts of daffodil. Behind the stone bench, a huge chestnut grew, its sugary blossoms littered the ground, and some had caught in her blond, jarred hair. She heard his step on the cobbles and turned to face him with green, lemur eyes.

  “Good morning, Reena,” Lefebvre said, suppressing his amazement. The twenty-two year-old girl had never appeared womanly—until now. Her movements always before had slurred, and she rarely responded to a greeting. Her face, which had been impassively slack before, shone bright with sapience, and her gaze met his vivid and animated, wholly unlike the flat stare he had become accustomed to. “May I join you?”

  “Yes, please,” she responded in a mellifluent voice he had never heard from her. “I was hoping you would come, but I didn’t really expect it. I know how busy you are at the beginning of your day.”

  Lefebvre could no longer hide his astonishment. He sat down as slowly as a man in free fall and seemed to hover above his seat on the bench, his jaw loose, dark eyes searching her face. Self-consciously, she put her hands to her sleep-wrangled hair, and a tinge of a blush showed even in the crinkled electric light. “Reena—what’s happened?” he finally
asked.

  “I don’t know, doctor.”

  “Yannick—please, call me Yannick.” His voice went airy with surprise. “I’ve known you for ten years now, when I was just a resident here. I’ve never seen you like this. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.”

  “Have you changed my medication?”

  “No. You’re still receiving the same antihallucinogen we began six years ago. One of its side effects is torpor, yet I’ve never seen you more lively. When did this begin?”

  “I had a dream,” she said and put a warm, almost magnetic hand on his. “A wonderful dream. I was inside other people’s minds. I was feeling what they felt, thinking what they thought.”

  “Were these people you know or were they imaginary?”

  “At first I didn’t know them. They were strangers—foreigners. One was Asian, the other I think American. They were men. The Asian was elderly and sleepy. The American – a teenager, full of hurt.

  “But then you dreamt of people you know?”

  “Yes. I dreamt of you. I sat in your office, at your desk, writing down your patients’ names, their drugs and doses. I woke after that, and my mind was clear. I’ve never felt this clear. Doctor—Yannick—do you think I’m better? I mean, do you think I’m cured?”

  “I don’t know, Reena.” He clasped her hand reassuringly. “We will have to do tests. We’ll begin at once, with a blood sample. Do you mind?”

  “No. But I would like to sit here for a while and watch the sun come up. This is the first time I’ve noticed it. May I?”

  “Certainly,” he replied, standing and feeling lightheaded. “I’ll make the arrangements.” He took her chin in his hand and grinned affectionately. “Reena, this could be medical history.”