Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  Yannick slumped. What’s really happening here? he wondered. Hadn’t she just read his mind? Of course not, you bumpkin. You’re projecting your fantasies again. A twinge of foolishness forked him. A shrink’s nightmare, he laughed to himself and reached out for Reena. “It’s okay,” he said with his soothingly familiar patience. “Just calm down. I’m impressed enough that you’re even talking with me. You don’t have to read my mind.” He gently pulled her hands from her face and peered into her tear-gleaming eyes with a grin. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be reading your mind. Come on, let’s take that blood sample.”

  She smiled back. Listening to him think had been like budging open the fire door to Hell one raging inch, enough to hear the mind’s cringing torment with her bones. She was the Devil’s pawn. But now that he was safe from her, she became as calm with him as though the world around her had never opened. She didn’t want to hear thoughts. She focused on his dark, clear eyes with their steady knowing that now, she knew, knew nothing at all.

  ***

  On the ride out to the airport, Cora hardly believed their luck. Night extended through the dark miles to Chicago, too familiar, too bleak with used car lots lit by strings of silver bulbs and all-night supermarkets in their haze of halogen spotlights to be anything special. Their old credit card, which had died months before in the pit of their poverty, had come alive again, and Howard used it to buy two first-class airplane tickets. The jangling telephone back home unplugged, the reporters left behind, reduced to interviewing the neighbors, the car ride was silent, both of them too numb with disbelief to do more than drive and listen to country and western on the radio. Even the announcement on the news of their big win—ten million dollars big—sounded like someone else’s luck. Only after they’d grinned their way past another gauntlet of reporters at the airport and the jet had taken off, lofting them deeper into the night, did their fortune seem real.

  With the help of the airline’s personnel, they had deceived the reporters into believing that they were bound for a getaway holiday in Miami Beach. At the gate, they had been secretly taken to a jet scheduled instead for Las Vegas. That had been Howard’s idea. He was on a roll—a feeling that she for the first time acceded was justified—and what better place to keep a roll going?

  Cora stared down at midnight America. Ember lights of cities and towns scattered in the darkness glimmered like the dropped sparks from a comet’s tail. A few hours ago, they had been down there, as hopelessly fixed in their fate as those tiny lights locked in darkness. Like everyone else, they had been dropped out of nowhere to burn their lives out where they found themselves. Now—and so suddenly—they floated above all that. What was happening to them? Where were they going?

  In the black reflection of the window, she met her face. She had never considered herself beautiful, though she knew she was attractive. Or at least once she had been attractive, twelve years before when she had worked as a hostess in a fine restaurant on the north shore of Chicago. There had been no end to the compliments and passes from men in those days, and she laughed to herself now to remember how it had annoyed her.

  She took out a small makeup mirror from her bag and regarded herself. Fifteen years of marriage to Howard and her job as a diner waitress glared at her from the fatigued flesh around her eyes—brown eyes, brown hair, brown age blotches that had once been freckles. She snapped the mirror shut and put it away. She was older than she could ever have admitted until now. Funny, she thought, how one has to afford to be honest.

  Howard dozed beside her, and the well-recognized sight of his long face open-mouthed with sleep brought a smile up out of her. She wondered for the first time since the frenzied miracle of winning the lottery how he had been so sure that they had won before the news had come on. Howard’s wild hunches had always been wrong before. She shook her head and closed her eyes. Maybe that’s why he was right this time. Even bad luck goes bad eventually.

  Howard knew it wasn’t luck. He had seen the lottery number drawn. He had actually been there, minutes before the actual event occurred. The numbered styrofoam balls had been a cloud of motion in the hopper. One by one, with wincing eagerness, he had watched his numbers pop into the plexiglass display tray. He grew convinced that somehow he had seen the future—somehow he had gone past the fabric of his skin and the seeps of seconds into minutes and had lived briefly in the future. Is that possible? he had asked himself continually since.

  Nothing had happened during the frenetic events after winning the lottery to explain his weird experience. The real world closed in fast as a bear trap, and the only escape seemed up. But once airborne and bound for the world’s gaudiest laboratory of chance, he began to ponder his future vision.

  His thoughts skittered across the surface of his mind as wild as that crumb of phosphorus he had once seen dancing on water in high school chemistry. Nothing connected, and he dozed. Retinal pastels under his closed lids trembled to a view of white waves shrugging toward shore, dazzling with sunlight on the sands. Diamond Head cut its distinct silhouette from a sky of towering, tropical clouds.

  Hawai’i? he puzzled, gawking through his sleepiness at the tangy sunlight on the green water. He willed himself away from that unexpected scene and imagined himself in Las Vegas.

  Chattering neon appeared at once. A roulette wheel whinnied before him, dice galloped, cards snorted their shuffles. This was the dream he wanted. The voltage of images crackled brighter in the vacuum of the dream.

  ***

  Donnie Lopes juddered awake. A milk-blue light filled the room, and the bunk above him, where Dirk Heiser had been laid out by Mr. Paawa, bucked. Donnie groggily sat up. The air quivered as if refrigerated, and he realized that this iciness had awoken him. He pulled his blanket off the cot, wrapped it around himself, gripped his cane from beside the headboard, tapped it to be sure Dirk hadn’t rigged it, and stood up.

  Something was happening. Dirk lay shrouded in his blanket, hunched over like he was heaving. Gray-blue light, similar to the static channel of a TV, squinted from under the blanket.

  “Dirk?” Donnie called, softly. “You okay?”

  The shambling shape under the blanket trembled violently, and the icy light winked brighter. An arctic chill swelled through the room.

  “Dirk, what’s happening?” Donnie said, louder. “Come on—you’re scaring me.” He reached out and pulled back the blanket.

  The room blared with lightning, and Donnie’s heart stopped. Dirk writhed under gruesome tendrils of gooey fire. His face, eyes open and bald, beamed glossy and just discernible beneath leech gills of viscous flames. The hot ichor pulsed and swelled and bulged like the ruffled skirts of a dayglow jellyfish, casting a blue shadow into the darkness around it. A scream twittered in Donnie’s throat when the whole wriggling mess reared up with Dirk’s limp body hung in its mucilaginous webs.

  Donnie’s brain thought to flee, but his muscles, soaked with terror’s gravity, moved too slow. A napalm coil unwound from the abomination and whip-clutched him around the throat. Frosty pain made his viscera jump in his rib-basket, choking off his scream, and plummeting him into a blackout.

  The luminous tentacle gently lowered Donnie to the floor and covered him with his blanket. Then, hunched over, with a blanket hooding it, the fiery cold being lurched out of the room dragging Dirk in its fibrillose grip and leaving a slime trail that whirled away in silvery tufts like tiny, vaporous ballerinas.

  On the roof of the Home, the monstrosity collapsed, and Dirk spewed onto the tarpaper. The glop wrinkled into a puddle and began immediately to percolate to a new shape.

  Dirk stirred. His muscles fluttered helpless, stringy and slack, and his head felt like an empty butane lighter snapping sparks but not lighting up. The last thing he remembered was the horrible apparition of his father’s face rising out from his pillow. A jolt of panic shook him—and then he remembered running, his fright galloping with him inside his heart, his whole body humming like a grenade—and finally, Mr.
Paawa.

  Dirk touched his jaw where he had been hit. It felt tender, but he could tell from the superficial sting that the flesh was hardly bruised. He sat up and noticed he was on the roof. An electric shine salted the darkness, and when he looked to see where it came from, a grimace of panic stretched his face flesh tight against his skull.

  Dirk’s father stood before him steaming blue radiance. “Don’t be afraid, son,” the ghost said in a voice from the far end of a tunnel. “You’re not cracking up. I’m real.”

  “You’re dead.” The words spoke themselves again, flung out of him by an appalling upwelling of dread.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dirk.” The ghost seemed sad, at the trembly brink of tears, and that softened Dirk’s alarm. “I’ve been brought back to warn you. The arc has to be returned. And soon. You’ve seen enough signs now. You must believe me.”

  “Mitch . . .” Dirk swayed to his feet groggily and reached for his father.

  “Don’t try to touch me. I am just a ghost.” A tear glinted along a seam of his face. “You look good, son. You look strong. I bet the girls go for you.”

  Dirk took the silver disc from his pocket. “This is what’s making everything crazy, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” He nodded with melancholy regret. “If only you hadn’t touched it, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Then take it.” Dirk held the disc out.

  His father’s eyebrows curled wistfully. “I can’t. I’m just an empty shape. But there are others who can help you. They’re on their way now, and they’ll be here soon.”

  “Who are they?” Dirk returned the disc to his pocket.

  “You’ve seen them. There are three of them. The arc is touching all of them the way it’s touching you.”

  “You mean those people in my dreams?”

  “They’re not dreams.”

  “Who are they?”

  “People. I’ve told you—the arc is from another dimension, another reality, completely different from anything we’ve known. To get back to where it came from it has to be returned to the exact spot where Donnie Lopes picked it up. The arc’s been trying to tell you this, but because it is from another dimension it doesn’t fit inside one mind. It needs the others to reach you.”

  “Okay, it reached me,” Dirk said with conviction. “I believe you. Let’s get it back.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll catch the next flight to the Big Island.”

  “You’ve got the money for the ticket?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “Where?”

  “In my desk—in my room.”

  The ghost shook its head and sighed lamentably. “The Judas Boys who gutted the cat and dog took it.”

  Dirk looked ill. “Christ. What’re we gonna do now?”

  “You may have to steal a boat.”

  “Me? Aren’t you gonna help?”

  “Dirk, I’d do anything I could for you.” He wiped tears from his eyes with his palms. “But this will be the last time you see me.”

  “What?” Dirk swayed, dizzy. “Why?”

  “The arc is through with me. I’ve got you to believe. That’s all it wanted from me.”

  “But that’s not fair. You’re my father—” Dirk’s mouth groped for what to say.

  “I am your father. And I love you, son.” His shape warbled like a heat mirage.

  “Hey—hold on!” Dirk dashed forward and grabbed at the image. Icy froth scattered in his grip. His father’s face hovered before him briefly, drained of color, blind flesh except for the eyes, luculent and imploring, dwindling to twin sparks like a star split by gravity millions of miles away.

  Dirk held his shivering hands open before him, the fulgent ether smoking off his fingers. The coolness of the apparition wafted up into the warmth of the tropical night. A moment later, he stood alone on the rooftop. He sunk to his knees under the weight of his dismay and stared out over the brink of the roof, past the black silhouette of Koko Crater, to the glittery brain of Honolulu.

  Every thought that came to him seemed like a cardboard toy, flat and lifeless. Pulsating with nameless feelings, he knelt for a long while, until memories of the three people he had seen in his recent dreams returned to him with a gleam like the solidity of furniture. He sat cross-legged and reviewed those dreams.

  These weren’t dreams, he grasped at once—they were empathic, even telepathic experiences. That made him straighten up. Empathic. What classroom had that word escaped from? He made fists until his fingernails bit his palms, hoping the pain would remind him of his creaturely self. The new thoughts beginning to open in him seemed more muscular. He stared hard toward the Earth’s far rim, where constellations tipped into the sea. His thoughts reached farther, around the whole Earth turning in its empty bed to an old man in China, a woman in France, and a silent majority couple six miles above the American heartland. Who were these people invading his mind?

  The answer unfurled in him like the beatitude in a shot of whiskey: He saw himself holding hands with the others in a circle that was as much a square, and in the center the silver disc clinked its rainbows. That scene was but a glimpse, yet the accompanying thoughts continued effulgent with abrupt insights. He and the others had been linked together by an alien.

  His father’s ghost had spoken the truth—this thing was too strange to grasp. He was just a high school kid. How was he supposed to use the welter of bizarre images that made him feel as though his brain were bulging like some balloon-headed future man? He couldn’t think everything that had to be thought. He needed the others.

  Reena was the one he felt closest to. She was pretty. And though five years older than he, she looked like a kid. Her face appeared in soft detail, fired with red and blue spectra, and a bubble swelled in his chest. All the rancor that had pickled his heart since Tina had left him two years ago vanished. Brightenings of feeling stirred in him as he studied her features—the devilish angel breadth of her eyes, her hair the feathery yellow of goldenrod or grass heads, sexily tousled, and the wings of her nostrils alert, widening and relaxing around a breath with a smell like snow.

  Generalized awareness continued in him, informing him that Reena provided the bond with the others and even with his own power. She was the one that the arc infused with telepathy. Even now, he sensed her sensing him.

  She was back in the courtyard of the hospice, a small bandage in the crook of her arm where Yannick had drawn blood. Other patients waited there, too—vapid-faced people in green smocks, sitting open-mouthed on the stone bench under the blooming chestnut, clear, almost white morning light lying on their tongues like wafers. Reena leaned at the iron fence, staring through the bars at the wooded hill that sloped down to the highway. A terrible sense of loneliness pervaded her. Though the thoughts of everyone in the courtyard filtered through her, she couldn’t connect meaningfully with any of them. If she had confirmed with Yannick that she could read his mind, he would have been damaged, she felt sure of that. But what was she to do? What was this curse that had lifted her out of her stupor only to cast her adrift in a nightmare of disembodied thoughts? Where was the Devil within her?

  Hi, Dirk said into his reverie of Reena and jolted with surprise when she started. Don’t be scared, I’m a friend.

  “No,” she said aloud to the invisible being. “You are the Devil.” She could feel the inside of Dirk Heiser’s presence—she could feel the fright in him, the rage that had clubbed and smashed all laughter in him to a prank. He was the Devil. And she feared him. “Go away, Satan!” she cried out—and the matron stared at her from under the chestnut.

  Reena looked about at the numb faces in the courtyard and the nurse guiding an elderly patient on the cobble path toward the rose arbor. Dirk’s bestial presence choked her with fear. The goblin noises in her head intensified until she focused on the breeze sizzling through the treetops and the hornets like points of lensed sunlight jittering among the flowe
rs. Why are you haunting me, Satan? she asked in her mind through a flurry of panic, and Dirk understood her: It didn’t sound like French or English, just pure understanding sharply edged in fear.

  I’m not Satan, he insisted. My name is Dirk, Excitement threaded through him, and he didn’t know what to say next. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on—it’s all new to me, and it’s just beginning to make some sense. But you have to understand, you’re not alone, Reena. The sound of her name coming from him struck like a gentle shock for both of them.

  Where are you? she asked, pressing her forehead against an iron bar to assure herself of her wakefulness.

  I’m in Hawai’i, he answered. Do you know where Hawai’i is?

  Far away.

  Can you see me?

  No.

  Well, I can see you. You’re beautiful. That thought had slid away from him before he knew what he was saying. He blushed, and that emotion skipped into the telepathic bond and made him blush more hotly. Look, I’m not the Devil. I know I must feel that way to you, because I’m a pretty rude guy—but I’m not that heavy. It’s an alien that’s given us these weird powers. Some kind of being from another world needs our help. I don’t think I can explain, because I don’t really understand. But I can see you, I guess because the alien has given you telepathic power. Do you understand?

  No. I don’t understand. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to see something of where this loose voice came from. Neural light freaked behind her lids, but no images appeared. The Devil is full of deceptions. I don’t believe you. How could she think otherwise? She could feel the hurt in him as wounded as the sea. To her, he was a phantom glaring with the anger of his own powerlessness. He was a scream wanting her body for a gag. “Get away from me, Satan!” she shouted.

  Dirk’s mind scrambled for some intelligent reply. I don’t know what to say to convince you, lady—but I’m not the Devil. You’ve got to believe me. I know that’s hard for you to accept, because you’ve been bonkers for so long. But you’ve got to trust me. This alien is trying to talk with us. I need your help. ... He broke off when he realized that Reena no longer heard him. The bond between them had frayed. In the next instant, his mental view of her dulled, then darkened to the granular blackness behind his closed lids.