Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  He walked away, her gentle smile glowing in him. What’s happening to me? he asked himself as ballast for his euphoria. Congenital brain dysfunctions don’t just heal. This is impossible. Her condition had obviously been misdiagnosed. With uncertainty, he reviewed the few known cases of self-integrating psychoses—but none of the symptom profiles matched Reena at all.

  At the end of the garden, he looked back. She gazed at the green copper filaments of dawn beyond the wrought iron fence of the courtyard, beyond the rooftops of Avignon in the Rhone Valley below—gazing with wonderment, and he shared that wonder. Today, dawn opened a vast rent in the blackness of space through which the fire of creation was burning away the night.

  ***

  “Wake up!”

  Howard Dyckson shuddered free of sleep and looked startled to find himself in his artificial leather recliner with a warm beer between his legs and the ten o’clock news muttering on the color console. “We’ve won, Cora!” he shouted at once.

  “Calm down, already,” his wife said from her rocker beside him. “You were just dreaming. Yelling in your sleep. The neighbors’ll think we’re arguing again.”

  “Cora, I tell you we won!” Howard lurched forward as his recliner righted itself, and his beer sloshed onto the carpet.

  “Howard! The rug!” Cora put down her crossword puzzle, seized a handful of tissues from the vinyl-topped sidetable beside her, and got down on hands and knees to blot the spilled beer.

  “Forget the damn beer,” Howard yammered. “We’ve won! We’ve won the fucking state lottery!”

  “Stop that!” Cora scowled at him from the floor. “You know I can’t stand foul language.”

  “Aren’t you listening to me?” Howard shrilled and bounded to his feet. “We’re millionaires!”

  “Howard, you were dreaming,” Cora said with grievous exasperation. “We’re flat broke, remember? You lost your unemployment check at last Saturday’s poker game. We had ketchup sandwiches for dinner. It gave you a nightmare.”

  “This was no nightmare, Cora.” Howard paced before the TV set, running his hands through his thinning hair. He was a gangly man with a rusty mustache and callused, grease-stained hands from fourteen years of working at the Caterpillar plant outside Peoria. The stains were still there, though he hadn’t worked in over six months. His large-featured face, usually saturnine until he was drunk, beamed luminous as a child’s. “I bought a lottery ticket with my cigarette money last week. Tonight’s the drawing. I saw them pick our numbers.”

  “You were dreaming, Howie.”

  “I tell you, Cora, it wasn’t a dream. It was as real as ... as me standing here with you. I was in the lottery room. I saw the drawing—and I saw the numbers. It’s ours, I swear it.”

  “The drawing’s happening now. How could you have seen it?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Then it’ll be on the news,” Cora said and resumed blotting the beer from the rug.

  “Fuck the news,” Howard said, striding into the kitchen. “I’m calling the lottery.”

  Cora pursed her lips grimly. Since Howard had been laid off, his need to gamble had gotten far out of hand. If he had been any good at gambling, she would have been more tolerant. But he never won, and their credit had been exhausted months ago. Her part-time salary as a diner waitress, his unemployment check, and the charity of friends were all that kept food on the table. And this week there was very little food because of his compulsion. She was grateful now that she could not have kids. For the fifteen years of their marriage, she had prayed for children, arranging for a high mass each time she found a new fertility doctor who gave her any hope. She and Howard were thirty-eight now. Older than Christ at the time of his ministry. All hope was gone, but at least their children wouldn’t have to help carry the cross of their poverty.

  She heard the phone clatter to the linoleum in a ringing bang, and she was up on one knee, on her way to the kitchen, when Howard appeared in the kitchen door. His face glittered with sweat, and his mustache twitched over a smile that showed all his thick teeth. A scream widened in her.

  ***

  O’ahu State Boys’ Home, an antique, gingerbread-colored building that had been built by missionaries the century before, not as an orphanage but as an asylum for the mentally ill, was located at the east end of the island. In the last century, it had been virtually unoccupied, and it still had bars—floriated wrought iron grille work—on most of the first-floor windows. An eight-foot wall of lava rocks encompassed several acres of royal palms, banana trees, and jasmine shrubs. A playground for younger kids adjoined the sprawling building, and a pond green with algae gleamed in a far corner of the grounds where mongoose from the sere hills came to drink with the sea wind.

  All memory of contact with the alien had drained from Donnie when Dirk took the arc, and the boy felt sullen with the oppressive sense of having misplaced something important. Dirk Heiser ignored him on the long ride back from the airport in the Home van that Mr. Paawa, the Home counselor, drove. A huge man with perpetually joyful eyes, fingers like cigars, and the girth of an ancient oak, Mr. Paawa had once been an orphan at the Home, too, and when there disciplinary problems came up, he was the one the other counselors turned to. There was a legitimacy to his authority that the others could never even approximate. When he heard from the high school vice-principal what Dirk had done to Donnie, he grabbed Dirk by the front of his pirate blouse and lifted him off his feet with one hand. “What you wen’ do dat for, brah?” he asked the boy in angry pidgin. Dirk had made no reply, and the large Hawai’ian, with a look of disgust, put him down and ordered him to sit in front so Donnie would have the rest of the van to himself.

  That arrangement satisfied Dirk, because now there’d be less of a chance of Donnie attempting one of his bizarre and lethal acts of retribution. During the eleven years of their tormented relationship, Donnie had openly defied Dirk only once—today, on the lava field. That was why Dirk had been more cruel than usual: Donnie had broken the rules, and that frightened Dirk. Over the years, Donnie had frequently and vehemently attacked him, but always surreptitiously. Three times Donnie had almost killed him.

  Once, when Donnie had rigged the toilet to mix explosive chemicals when it flushed, Dirk had escaped because he’d seen vapors fuming from the swirling water. He dived out of the stall a moment before the toilet bowl burst apart with a stunning boom. No one believed his story about the explosive chemicals, and he was punished for flushing fireworks.

  Another time, Donnie had concocted his own curare, tipped a bent needle with it, and taped it to his shoulder under his shirt. After Dirk slugged him there in his daily endeavor to strike the righteous nerveblow that would numb Donnie’s whole arm, his hand swelled up black and rubbery as an eggplant. He spent two days in the hospital sweating a possible amputation, and Donnie claimed it was purely accidental. The poison-tipped needle he claimed as an invention for numbing lab animals for vivisection in biology, and he carried it in a specially tailored shoulder pocket so he would never accidentally misplace it. Dirk wailed when he learned that the counselors actually believed Donnie.

  The gimp had a genius for designing fatal accidents. Like God, there remained no trace of him in his best creations. Most recently, shortly after Paawa hit upon the vicious idea of rooming Dirk with Donnie in an effort at bringing Dirk’s cruelties out in the open and so collect sufficient cause to have him transferred to the Correctional Facility, Donnie acquired a pet rat. Dirk slept restlessly for six weeks, waiting for Donnie to slip the thing in his pajamas while he slumbered. Then one lazy Sunday morning he got up as usual in the last half hour before the kitchen closed and went into the shower room to his shower, the one with the forceful spray away from any drafts. When he turned the water on, a sizzling torrent of army ants rushed up his arm and began to eat his brain. He was being electrocuted. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t even breathe. Another kid saw him and used a mop to break his hold on the metal spiggot, and he writhed on t
he tiles for minutes with flurries of insects scurrying through his body. Later he learned that he had almost died in a freak accident. An electrical line inside the wall had come into contact with the shower’s metal pipe when its insulation had been eaten away by a rat.

  Dirk, certain Donnie would try something after the incident on the Big Island, would have to stay alert once this ride ended, but for now he could afford to ignore him.

  Donnie didn’t look that bad—his clothes were hardly ripped, and he wasn’t bleeding, only bruised. Donnie knew how to fall if he knew anything.

  During the ride to the Home, Mr. Paawa lectured Dirk on Christian fellowship, but Dirk’s gaze got lost in the traffic on Kalanianaole Highway as he pondered the strange dreams he had endured on the flight back from the Big Island.

  The vivid dreams made no sense to Dirk except as a fallout of anxiety from the threat of Ipo and Chud. His tongue throbbed with swollen hurt from having bitten it during his encounter with the two hoods, and he massaged the cut reflexively with his teeth while he considered his options. After a moment, he realized there were no options. The ice he had sold the Judas Boys had been good. He figured that their accusation of its poor quality served as a lame excuse for shaking him down. He had a hundred fifty dollars left from his drug sale to the Judas Boys, and he had a hot car stereo tucked away in Donnie’s locker, though he wouldn’t get much for that since he had damaged one of the speakers when he had ripped it out of an unlocked car in Waikiki. He also had a couple of watches that he had stolen from beach blankets, almost worthless black plastic digitals. He could return the clothes he’d bought with the Judas Boys’ money, but his wardrobe was already impoverished. Watching the sea glimmer under serifs of red cloud, he knew he couldn’t get a grand together, even if he had a week to do it. His only realistic option was to stay in the Home, find a way to get the two hundred fifty dollars back to the Judas Boys, and beg them to withdraw their seven hundred fifty dollar penalty.

  The thought of begging the Judas Boys galled Dirk, and by the time the sea cliffs near the Home appeared he had schemed up bold ways to get the money. For some years, he had toyed with the idea of a ski mask bank robbery, though he had never been desperate enough until now to consider it seriously. This would be the last year that he could pull off such a stunt with his juvenile status as insurance in the event that he fumbled and got caught. He designed a handgun of balsa and shoe polish in his mind when the van turned off the highway and the caldera of Koko Crater overlooking the Home swung into view.

  Mr. Paawa dropped Donnie off at the dorm entrance at the side of the building, but he held Dirk back with a firm hand on his elbow. “Lissen up, Mistah Tough Guy,” the counselor said. “Roughin’ up cripples stay easy. But wot you t’ink you wen’ do you come leave dis place—eh?”

  “Survive,” Dirk said and hopped out of the van. He watched Paawa drive off, and he lingered on the driveway, staring west through a stand of leaning palms at the flame-horned crater. The bronzed sky returned to him something of the autumnal feeling that he had experienced when he had held the silver disc. That feeling had been strong, and if he had not been terrified of Ipo and Chud, he might have paid it more heed. An arc his dream-father had called the disc, and he smiled at the absurdity of that. By now he had completely convinced himself that the encounter with Mitch’s ghost was indeed a dream and that the weirdly dizzying trance that had momentarily disoriented him outside the lava tube must have been nothing more than a reaction to the shock Ipo and Chud had so expertly induced. He reached into his pocket and took out the arc (that was as good a name as any, he figured). In the crepuscular light, it appeared almost blue and again grained with rainbows. It looked quite beautiful, and he wondered what it really was.

  A hideous scream pierced the twilight. It had come from the dorm wing, and Dirk rushed in to gawk. The scream shrieked again, this time more strangled and grievous, and he followed it swiftly up the metal stairs that smelled of chewing gum to the room he shared with Donnie where a gaggle of younger kids crowded outside the door.

  Dirk shoved his way through the blanch-faced kids and found Donnie pressed up against the wall with his back to Dirk’s color poster of a hydrogen cloud, the handle of his aluminum cane held to his tragically downcurved mouth, eyes startled and watery. Dirk looked to where he stared, and a gag of horror throttled him. Lying on Dirk’s cot a Scot terrier and a black cat—Hunza and Peppercorn, the Home pets—lay with their bellies sliced open and slithery ropings of viscera unraveled around them.

  Dirk knew who had done this. The Judas Boys meant to do more than punish him. They intended to torture him. Now it became terrifyingly clear to Dirk that they never intended for him to pay them the grand, and Dirk was mulling that over when Mr. Paawa, grunting with revulsion at the sight of the carnage, grounded Dirk for the rest of the spring break. The Home offered no sanctuary. It was his trap.

  Dirk carried a shovel and the animal corpses wrapped in the bloodied bedsheets out into the back field by the pond, but Donnie, who had been the animals’ caretaker, insisted on burying them himself. With his weak leg, he had difficulty digging up the weed-matted Earth. When Dirk tried to help, the gimp shoved him away. In the darkness, lit only by distant lights from the Home, Donnie’s slippery face had the sheen of a blister. “Get out of here!” he shouted. He raised the shovel. “Get out or I’ll kill you!”

  Dirk plucked the shovel from Donnie’s hands and pushed him to the ground. “You’re not killing anybody, gimp.”

  “You killed the animals,” Donnie said bitterly. “The people you steal for killed the animals. And now I’m not helping you anymore. I’ll go to the police and give them what you stole.”

  Dirk raised the shovel like a spear and heaved it. Donnie screamed, and the shovel dug into the Earth next to his ear. “Look, gimp, I didn’t kill those fucking animals. The people who did are crazy, and if you turn me in, I’ll see they get you.” He stooped over Donnie and snarled, “Understand?”

  Hoisting Donnie up, Dirk placed the cane firmly into boy’s hands and pushed him toward the Home. “You get out of here,” he ordered. “I’ll take care of this.”

  Donnie stared furiously at him, and Dirk could see a hideous vendetta forming in him, eyes twitching as the rat of his brain shivered with rage. He turned abruptly and limped off.

  Dirk dug furiously, attacking the Earth with furor. He made the hole deeper than necessary, because he couldn’t stop the maniac strength volting through his limbs. He threw the linen-wrapped carcasses into the pit and heaved earth over them. As he stamped the dirt of the finished mound, grunting lopsided cries of anger and hurt, a voice swooped over him from beside the pond: “You shouldn’t be here, Dirk.”

  Dirk whirled about in a horrific spurt of recognition. His father stood at the lip of the pond, dressed in jungle fatigues and combat boots, dusk light stretching through him ice green and smoky red, though the night was black as space. Dirk screamed and reflexively threw the shovel at the ghost. His father caught it with one hand and stuck it upright in the mud. “Don’t break down on me now, boy,” his father admonished. The luminiferous haze misting through him slimmed away, and he stepped forward solid as a policeman. “Hold on.”

  Waves of fright tumbled through Dirk, and it took all his strength to keep from collapsing under the impact of his fear. Blood whistled in his ears as the coil of another scream began to unwind.

  “Calm down, Dirk. I’m not going to hurt you.” The ghost stepped forward, tasseled grass bending under his boots, and the drum-music in the boy’s head boomed louder. “I’m here to warn you. The arc has to be returned. Now. Or you are doomed—and a lot of other people with you.”

  “Who are you?” his lungs squeaked.

  “I’m your father—back from the dead to warn you. Return the arc. Right now.”

  “How?” Dirk’s breath leaked out of him.

  “Find a way.”

  The pallid, trembling boy waved his arms before him. “No,” he moaned. �
�How have you come back?”

  “The arc brought me back, son—to warn you.”

  “How do you know about the arc?”

  “The arc is using you, Dirk. Your body’s an antenna. The arc is using you to receive me.”

  “From where? What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m all around you, Dirk. So are all the dead.”

  A shout jumped from behind Dirk, and he glanced over his shoulder to see a flashlight star-webbed in tarry darkness. When he looked back to his father, the ghost was gone.

  “Mitch?”

  “I never hit no boy in this Home,” Mr. Paawa’s voice grumbled from behind the glare of the approaching flashlight. “But if you don’t get your ass inside from now, I’m goin buss you up.”

  “Mister Paawa,” Dirk pleaded in a mournful tone, “you’ve got to help me.”

  “Foah shuah.” The large man stepped up to Dirk with quick, long strides and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “If you wen hurt Donnie gen, if I even see ‘em runnin from off you, you fine beeg trouble, boy.”

  “Mister Paawa, I’m already in big trouble. You’ve got to help me.” Dirk’s face bleached with fear and his hands trembling, he stepped away.

  “What stay wrong wit you?” the big man gruffed.

  “I don’t know.” Dirk covered his face with his quivering hands. “I think I’m cracking up.”

  “You tell one doctah.” Mr. Paawa thrust Dirk toward the Home. “ ‘Ey, move! Moah trubble from you an you outta heah. You tink you so radical, eh? Da fock. Bumbye you make one home in da JD cage den. Dass where you gone stay. See you preshuh out dere.”

  “I don’t want to pressure out there or here, man. I’m telling you something’s wrong with my head.”

  “Dat de troot.”

  Dirk shuffled back toward the Home, head hung. Mr. Paawa thought him contrite, scared of the older man’s size and brusqueness, and the counselor felt he had done his duty. Dirk went straight to his room, ignored Donnie, who sat hunched over his desk, and clambered into the upper bunk. He lay there with his clothes on and no bedsheets. He ignored the revulsion that he lay where Hunza and Peppercorn had died. Donnie had opened a window to air out the stink of the gutted animals, and the draft slinking through the room carried the hallway’s scents of ammonia and dried chewing gum. The familiarity of the odors mixed poorly with the vertiginous horror that had opened in him beside the pond. He stared at the hairline fractures in the ceiling, wondering what had brought this madness upon him and to what hell it led.