Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Dirk,” Donnie’s voice whined from beside him.

  Dirk whirled about and was halfway to a crouch when he saw that Donnie wasn’t armed.

  “Don’t be mad, okay?” Donnie pleaded. “I didn’t tell Paawa anything. Your stuff is safe in my locker. I was talking hot before. You know, I loved Hunza. I always thought Peppercorn was a little weird. The way all cats are, I guess. But I never wanted anything bad to happen to him.”

  Dirk slumped backward on the bed, exhaled his relief, and rolled his head to the side. He looked into the red filaments of Donnie’s wet eyes. “Forget the animals,” he said. “There’ll be others.”

  “You’re not mad at me anymore?” he asked in a voice burred with anxiety. The sight of his twitchy face only heightened the thundering terror in Dirk. What was the gimp setting him up for?

  “Go to the game room and watch some TV,” Dirk ordered. His heart felt like a fist banging to get out.

  “You’re not going to scare me tonight when I’m sleeping, are you?”

  “What about you scaring me?”

  Donnie stared into Dirk’s pale face and realized that he was scared. “You’re really shook up,” he said with a tinge of amazement.

  Dirk shut his eyes, and the darkness there gleamed, nerved with a beaded light like the skin of a reptile that breathed brighter and darker with the mad cadence of his heart. “Forget about me, Donnie. Just get lost.”

  “You want me to get you some new bedsheets?”

  “No.” Dirk sat up, his head in his hands. He could feel madness buzzing in him, angry for a way out. “Get lost—now, gimp!”

  Donnie spun away, swiveling on his cane, and was at the door when Dirk called out: “Hey, hold on.” The bully dug into his pocket and took out the silver disc that he had taken for himself on the Big Island. “You want this back?”

  Donnie frowned at him, puzzled. “What is it?”

  “Aw, forget it.” He waved Donnie off, and the boy hurriedly limped away. “Fuck,” Dirk said softly, as though praying. “What the hell are you?” He looked closely at the arc, studying it for a seam or a pin bolt, anything that would hint at its construction. The metallic surface appeared flawlessly smooth. An opalescent whorl gleamed like a fingerprint as the electric light from the desk lamp reflected off it.

  Dirk returned it to his pocket and rolled about to lie down again, but what he saw on his pillow skewered him with fright. Bleary with anguish, glistening with a shiny force that swirled like hot oil, a face pushed out of his pillow. Terror cramped his heart, and he recognized the greasy features of his father, his lineaments straining for breath.

  Howling, Dirk fell from the bunk and bounced off the floor and out the door. Whimpering incoherently, he dashed down the hall. Donnie, stepping out of the game room with his face in a comic book, collided with him, and the two tumbled to the floor. Dirk frenzied, hysterical with alarm, and he thrashed to his feet, boosting Donnie out of his way and bolting down the hallway and into Mr. Paawa.

  With one glance at Donnie sprawled on the floor, groping for his cane and Dirk feverish to get away, Mr. Paawa saw enough. “You ass fo eet, bully boy!” he roared and slammed Dirk against the wall.

  “There’s a face on my bed!” Dirk screamed.

  “Wat you tink? I gone lolo-in-da-head or wat? Less see how you like cut em up wit someone no cripple kine.” Mr. Paawa feinted with his left, and Dirk instinctively dodged and caught the counselor’s right jab with his jaw. His head snapped back, eyeballs rolling white, and Mr. Paawa grabbed his body as he slumped. He draped the boy over his shoulder and carried him back to his room. “He no nevah touch you again,” he told Donnie as he strode past.

  Mr. Paawa lay Dirk on the top bunk and lifted the pillow off the bed. It looked glossy with something like snail slime, and he threw it to the floor. He shook his head at the unconscious youth. “You one sick kine kid.”

  ***

  The big rocks danced, and Jiang rang with life. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the tall trees and lay calm and still among moss-shawled boulders. Two of the boulders danced in the brassy sunlight—huge, gray-green bulks of rock pranced, swayed, and pivoted around each other, coughing like an earthquake and filling the air with the damp, cold scent of the soil they had hidden, a fragrance like the breath of a glacier. Jiang breathed deeply of the loamy redolence, his withered visage gleaming with pride. One of the boulders grazed a gnarled pine, splintering the tree and sending the old man flopping to his belly to avoid flying shards. The breath whooshed out of him, and the dancing boulders boomed back to stillness, one of them cracking open with a râle like dynamite.

  Jiang peered up timidly from where he had dropped. This power was new in him, and though he exulted in it, he hardly understood it and had no idea what to expect. He rose slowly, dusting off his baggy gray trousers and gray Mao jacket. Where the boulder had split, a fossil lay visible in the grain of the rock. Jiang approached it and touched the fern-shaped skeleton of the broad-headed fish very gently. What had become of him that he could open the hearts of rocks?

  Until a few hours ago, when he had awoken from his dream of moving stones at will and had discovered that he could move stones at will and had shocked himself into a watchful reverie by building a pyramid of poised stones only to alarm the old widow and the militiaman she had brought as a witness, Jiang had felt doomed. He was old, already a teen when the last dynasty collapsed and China’s first republic was established at the beginning of the Christians’ twentieth century, and he had been enfeebled by a long life of manual labor and tragedies. He himself had felt like a rock melting among roots.

  The dream changed everything. For the last few hours, Jiang had been feeling stout and spry, centered between sky and sod, burgeoning with power the way a flower fills with sun. The power had lifted him to his feet and marched him sprightly away from his village and down the dusty road, east, to here, where thrusts of rock leaned against each other like drunks.

  And the power wasn’t through with him yet. Demon or god, the power lifted him like a feather. His legs and feet filled with vigorous strength and gusted him over the earth. He waved farewell to the fossil fish, the ocean of time between them like an unfocused stare. A wind-teased mist blurred his sight, and he wiped his eyes with his thumbs so he could see where he was going. Not that it mattered: The power muscling through his legs seemed to know precisely where each footfall belonged. Old pines swung past like gibbets, the stony path smeared under his black slippers, and his body felt awake and lively with seething joy.

  Jiang placed his mind ahead, contemplating where it was that his new strength was carrying him. Behind him was everything he wanted to forget: The village where he had been born, where he had lost his parents to famine, where he had lost his children to war, where he had lost himself to the debts of the past. Wherever he was going was better. Even death was better.

  Beyond the rock-staggered hillside at the edge of the village, the land leveled and unrolled to the horizon in fields shimmering with young rice. Jiang laughed to see the green distances polished by the wind, and his laugh chimed like a bell. Workers looked up with their fates muddy in their hands and watched Jiang rushing by. No one had ever seen anyone moving so swiftly, let alone a wizen-faced old man whose wispy beard and smoke-thin hair streaked backward with speed. Water buffalo stopped their dolorous trudging, and farmers shouted and pointed until the galloping old man rushed out of sight.

  With his heart in the weather, Jiang felt like a cloud in the streaming sky, drugged on the pollen scents of the fields, mindless for the first time in recent memory of the many years that had sped from him so airily. The paddies bounded away behind, and orchard trees bristled along the roadside. He pointed his mind into the red jeweled tree haunts, and an apple swooped toward him like a bird. He snatched it out of the air and took a crisp bite in midstride.

  Demon, you cannot drive me crazy! He munched the apple, grinning. Lewd with incredulity, sexually stoked with the amazement of his d
emonic possession, he announced, Carry me to the ends of the Earth if you will. As long as you feed me, I will laugh!

  Strength shouted in him, and his heart gulped, not with fatigue, but with ecstasy. When he looked up at the clouds, they were the skywriting of the gods, waiting for his editing. He could will a cloud to vanish, and it puffed away before his eyes—until he pulled it back together in a lathery tumult of thunder-blue. Lightning stabbed the cloud, and rain streaked from the sunny sky. But he didn’t get wet. The rain peeled around him, fuming away like the wake of a fast ship.

  When he glanced to either side, the world got tangled in itself like good and bad luck: A pond and its rocks like a sunken city, a rare hillock of woodland tatty with dead leaves, bamboo, and shrubs, rocky fields where the farmers lived too entranced by five thousand years of hunger to look up. The land was the same China he had always known, a rag of stones and mud and tattered green. Yet, the land shone, rubbed bright by his speed.

  A truck laden with woven baskets filled with cabbages appeared around the bend in the road, traveling east and trawling a balloon of dust behind it. In moments, Jiang swung alongside it, dust whirling around him but not touching him. He waved to the lazy-eyed driver as he came up beside the cab, and the man hung out the window in mute amazement. The truck accelerated to catch up with the old man, and Jiang surged forward in a blur of speed that left the rackety vehicle clattering far behind on the rutted road.

  Untainted by weariness, Jiang would have continued devouring miles until he reached the sea, but eventually the power dimmed in him. He slowed to a stroll and soon thereafter found himself plodding down the dirt road by his own weary strength. He stopped and sat beneath a shabby tree. Over the western hills, the sun closed its wings, and the minutes of twilight gathered in purple clouds.

  Jiang felt wrung, older than he had ever felt. The marvelous power that had carried him so far from his village was utterly gone, and momentarily he experienced a spasm of horror at the unnatural force that possessed him. The absence of facts gaped like a wound, and he waited for the pain of his ignorance to overcome him. Instead, he slept.

  ***

  The dawn sun quivered like a gong, and Reena sat up straighter on the stone bench under the chestnut tree. Her bones felt like old plumbing, knocking in her with a pressure that wanted out. Voices gurgled from inside, growing louder with the blue morning. Her hands went to her head as if to feel out the damage there. It was happening again. She was going mad. Within the impenetrable crucible of her skull, bubbling voices burst into words.

  The oddity was, she understood these voices. They weren’t speaking the glossolalia she had sometimes heard before, which had sounded to her like gibberish. These new voices in her head spoke French—some as clearly as Yannick and some as garbled as the other patients.

  A terrible revelation unfolded in her as the chapels, chimneys, and rooftops of Avignon vanished in the brightening and the trees rose from the hills younger and the clouds began their silent conversations—a new day, a new life: She was hearing the thoughts of the people around her!

  At first, she thought her revelation meant a resumption of her insanity. Birds jabbered their matin songs in the courtyard, and the childhood of the day filled with the lively clatter of dishware and the murmur of the cooks in the kitchen behind the courtyard. Yet—beyond the moist voices of the birds and within the muffled kitchen noises—she heard people thinking. There seemed to be basically two strains of loud thoughts, both incredibly clear, unnaturally clear, as if distance could not intervene on their clarity. The first thoughts she identified were jaunty, like the birds throwing themselves on the wind: She distinguished the sound and feel of the cooks in the hot weave of breakfast fragrances, and she sensed Yannick and the matron, feeling awkward with what they had just seen of her: “Her life has been locked up until now,” Yannick said while thinking, Not just incommunicado but somehow bound in the roots of her blood. “What could have freed her?”

  The other strain of thoughts seemed sad, desolate, and pervasive, like the gloomily purple color of twilight when the radioactive energies of space become briefly visible. That expressed the duende of this place. That was the depraved, crazy, embittered energy of this place, disconnected from the outer world—a hellishly interior energy jumping about in her nerves so fast it could never be controlled. She thanked God that wretchedness had ended. That was not her anymore. She had gotten free of that—for now.

  “I’ll bring her down to the lab right away,” the matron said, and her voice sounded so distinct that Reena looked over her shoulder for her. Of course, she sat alone in the courtyard. The upturned face of the circular walk gleamed sweaty with dew, while the banks of flowers remained unlit.

  She stood, and the deadfall rhythm of her steps on the cobbles mimed the futility of her own thoughts. What had brought her to this? Wasn’t it better to have been the way she was, asleep in her flesh, her mind held still by the magnet power of the Earth, all thoughts dragged from her the way the body was dragged at the end of a life? What good was her mind awake if she was forced to be lidlessly alert to the tortured soul of this maimed planet? She concluded that she served as the Devil’s pawn.

  Hearing redundant, torpid mutterings escaping from the hospice like heat, the dark breathing, the goblin chatterings, and occasionally the breezy clarity of the thoughts of the cooks, she felt like a ghost looking for its head, wanting its skull to shut out these astral noises. The furious, uncontainable lightning of the hospice crackled its ceaseless static in waves of intensity. After a while, she realized that she could dim the noise for a giddy moment by placing her attention outside of herself. She had never had attention before, and that felt as eerily new to her as the telepathic gnatterings.

  Reena returned her concentration to the trance of light widening over the city. The sun-daubed hills outside the iron fence glowed with exhaled mists from the city. Staring at industrial froth lifting with the solar tide, the cacophony of voices in her head hived off. Her mind went clear again – though, deeper within, echoes turned in the wells of her ears.

  “Reena,” the matron called from the doorway to the hospice. “Will you come with me, please?” The poor dear looks troubled. I hope Yannick didn’t alarm her.

  “It’s not Yannick,” Reena said, turning away from the factory plumes. “It’s the newness of all this that’s troubling me.

  The matron’s face wobbled, and Reena realized that the older woman hadn’t spoken aloud her thought about Yannick. The matron crossed herself, and Reena felt unholy. “Come with me, Reena,” the large woman said in a small voice.

  Reena concentrated on the sherbet-green walls of the corridor so as not to hear the matron’s reaction. Inside the building, numerous voices of hurt minds moiled in the dark holes of her head, and she was glad to be able to shut them out.

  The sharp radiance of the lab with its medicinal odors, chrome fixtures, and old, white marble countertops made concentration oddly more difficult, and she frowned with her effort to keep out the voices like a tree struggling to hold back its buds. She looks like she’s in pain, Yannick’s voice bloomed loudest. Maybe skipping her medication this morning is not a good idea after all.

  “I’m okay,” Reena announced in the doorway. “It’s not just a lapse in my medication.”

  “What’s that?” Yannick said. He sat on a stool at a counter with a microscope, a rack of syrettes, and stoppered flasks with cider-bright samples of urine.

  Reena entered, and Yannick noted the self-awareness in the poise of her stare. The green, sacklike hospice dress she wore seemed incongruous with the clear, direct feeling in her face. “I do feel clearer,” she admitted. “And this dress does look ridiculous, doesn’t it?” She looked at herself in the shiny surface of a thermoclave and plucked a chestnut blossom from her yellow hair.

  “I haven’t said anything to you,” Yannick told her and glanced at the matron, who stood in the doorway looking troubled.

  “Doctor—” Reena sa
id, facing him and then stalling at the sight of his puzzlement. The dark voices surrounded her like the muted pealings of a sunken bell.

  “Call me Yannick, please,” he insisted. “We’ve known each other long enough.” Though now I hardly think I know you at all.

  “That’s just it, Yannick.” She stepped closer. “I hardly think I know myself at all.”

  Yannick sat up taller. He stared haplessly at Reena, then dismissed the matron with an urgent wave. It isn’t possible that you’re reading my mind. Telepathy is a fantasy.

  “I am hearing you in my mind, Yannick.” She stared at him with the timidity of a squirrel. “I don’t believe this is a fantasy.”

  A mishmash of wonder, fear, and disbelief filled Yannick and yanked the strings of his face. “Hold on now!” he cried to himself and rested his head in the gap between his thumb and forefinger. He struggled to control the hysteria toiling in him. If you can really hear my thoughts, Reena, I want you to say to me, “The moon is blue once every three years.”

  Reena experienced a flash of excitement so sharp it hurt, as though somehow a match had been struck in her heart. She heard his voice ringing in her mind with his stupendous awe—but behind that furious wonder, she felt something else in him. That something was smooth, cool, and shatterable as porcelain. It was his sanity. It was the bowl of his mind, as tangible and forgotten in its usefulness as the pan of the brain. The words he wanted her to speak rolled heavily in her like dense ball bearings. If she spoke those words, they would leap out of her fast as bullets, and their impact would blast him to bits. “I can’t!” she said in a flogged breath and covered her face with her hands.