Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  Reena! It’s me, Dirk!

  Tick-tock, mock-knock, dock-cock—help me!

  Monkeys in the oaks of Bashan—elephants in the toilet—if the baby’s not ready by dawn, then we’ll just have to boil it.

  She would stand there, brimming with Hell’s noise, until she stared herself free. The paint on the wall chipped from the force of her gaze.

  The door opened, and Yannick entered. “Reena, thank you for waiting here for me.” He looked sullen, his right hand in his pocket.

  “I’m not mad anymore.” Her voice sounded clouded.

  “Something is distressing you.” Yannick’s long face bobbed closer. “Why are you frowning?”

  “You’re going to medicate me again.”

  “You’re much better than I’ve ever seen you, Reena. But you’re troubled, aren’t you? I think you’re hearing voices. Is that so?”

  She shook her head and backed away. The matron appeared in the doorway with a glass of water.

  “We’ve talked about the voices before. You don’t have to be afraid with me. I understand.” Yannick removed his hand from his pocket. He held a vial of tiny pink pills. “These will help you. They’ll make the voices disappear.”

  “But I don’t want the voices to disappear,” she blurted and skipped past Yannick. “This is Satan’s world. The Bible says so. Don’t you see? He’s the only one who can help me.”

  The matron put out her thick arm to stop her. Reena stared into her glowering face and shouted, “No!”

  The matron’s face went simple, and her arm dropped. Reena dashed right past her and ran with all her might down the hallway, up a flight of stairs, and into the courtyard.

  Amber sunlight fell in coins through the leafy chestnut tree. Vapor trails thin as scars etched the late afternoon sky. A whole day had been spent dissolving into the voices in her head. Hard to believe now that just this morning she had thought she was cured. She anchored herself to the iron fence and laughed.

  Ask the sun and the moon and the stars. Go on, ask them. See if they care.

  Reena, calm down, already. I’m back. You’re not crazy. Not anymore. And I’m not Satan.

  Where’s my bifocals? Where’s my ink? By the Devil’s teeth, what good is memory if I can’t see or write?

  The white owl! God, it’s eating me!

  A hand rested on her shoulder. She lurched about, skittery as an animal. “Relax, Reena,” Yannick said. “You know I want what’s best for you.”

  “Why did you put me in the room?” she asked, her eyes hot.

  “You haven’t eaten anything all day. You’ve been very active, pacing the halls, returning to this fence time and again. I thought you were being overly stimulated. I could have given you a tranquilizer. Instead I asked you to sit for a while in a bare room to see if that would calm you down. And it hasn’t.”

  “So, now I must take the tranquilizer.”

  “No. I’m not going to dope you.” He took out the vial of pink pills again. “This is a new medicine. It won’t make you tired. It will just stop the voices.”

  “What if I told you that the voices I’m hearing are the thoughts in other people’s heads?” Her eyes gleamed, green as reef water.

  “We’ve been through that, Reena. This morning, remember?”

  She had backed out then, she remembered. Somehow, she had reached tenderly into him then and had felt the measured pace of his mind—and she had sensed the terrible thunder behind the lightning of revelation that she had almost struck him with. That thunder would have shattered him, she was convinced. She liked him too much for that.

  He shook out one pink pill and held it in his palm for her.

  She nodded imperceptibly and took it.

  After she had swallowed it, he patted her cheek. “Now just rest here for a while. Everyone else is eating dinner. I’ll see that your meal is kept warm, and you can have it later. I have to go now, but I’ll see you first thing in the morning. We’ll have a long talk then. Okay?”

  He left, and she stared up at the vapor trails pinking with the sunset to veins in the sky.

  You’re not crazy, Reena. You don’t need that pill. Dirk shivered, giddy in the stretched light that connected him with Reena’s lifeforce. The rapture of their bond ached in him like wisdom. The alien’s presence expanded through him with intimations of understanding. A plenitude of knowing opened. I can help you, he told her with conviction.

  She shut her eyes at the sound of Dirk’s voice. He sounded so different from the blatherings of the other voices. He sounded closer, alert, deeply alive. He was the supreme demon.

  Look, if you want to, you can pull the plug on this drug, Dirk’s voice continued in her. I feel like I know how. We can try. It’s the only way we can keep in touch.

  The intimacy of his presence assuaged her fear. She could feel beyond his vicious exterior, which was all she had identified of him before. Deeper than the brash insensitivity that had felt to her like thistly fright and drumming anger plumbed a composure warm as fleece. Soothing, almost plaintive, a song cadence glittered from the depth of his being. Reena listened to its broody calling, lonely and weird as a wolf song but at the same time remindful of the silkiest breezes of spring, sweet with the scent of miles of grass. She sat down on the mossy ground, her back against the iron fence. When the pill took hold, she would lose this contact—and without the voices, she would be wholly alone. Even Satan was preferable to the void that she had lived until today. “What must I do?”

  Dirk’s mind reeled. He heard the lonely song, too – voluptuous as crystal. It was the diamond body grindstone of heaven, crushing the grains of time into seconds, shattering his ignorance into thoughts and words and a feeling as dilapidated and glorious as sunset. Keep your eyes closed. That’ll help to turn your telepathy on yourself. Look for the drug. You’ll see it. Those thoughts belonged to the alien, steeped in heavy silence, hurtling into his mind from out of nowhere.

  Reena complied, imagining herself looking inward. Instantly, the dark behind her lids lit up with a platinum radiance like moonlight, and silence squeezed her.

  This is the light of your body, Dirk’s smooth voice informed her. Everything living glows. You’re in the heat of that now. So think about your stomach. You haven’t eaten all day. You’ll locate the drug easily.

  Her attention settled under her breath to the pit of her stomach. The silvery luster of her closed eyes flickered with spark-points, crimson and azure and looped in a fine tracery of vibrations like golden threads, and she knew without hearing Dirk that she observed the pink pill shredding into molecular strings. Her attention had shrunk into this kinetic frenzy, and she could see the very atoms of the drug heat-wobbling in golden nets of molecular bonds.

  Dirk moved closer now than words. He became the knowing within her. Am I mad? she wondered—and silence lipped apart. The world around her screamed like a wounded mammoth. The wind in the chestnut howled, and the litter of noises from the kitchen avalanched over her.

  Hey—concentrate! Dirk commanded. Frantic energy from the alien grew into thoughts and understandings like a timelapse film of a crystal garden. Forget what’s outside you. Focus inside. You can do it, Reena. Hurry, before the drug reaches your brain and shuts me out.

  Intently, she pulled her attention inward again. Sounds muted, and she sat alone once more in the soft glare of her biofield. Attention honed to the remote effervescence in her stomach, and she found the red and blue speckles unwinding their golden loops. Only now, there were masses more of them—a swirling cloud of confetti lights in a gold haze.

  The knowledge of what to do next arrived, astonishing her with its immediacy. She had to go into this festival of molecular unravelings. Like a parachutist, she descended into the bustling cloud. Vision dazzled with barbed lights and swirly mists of sunlight. The sunlight was the bond energy—and the spurs of fire the atoms themselves.

  The wavering intensity of the molecules blurred her vision, and the soft background haze abruptl
y resolved to jangled colors of geometric plates and amorphous blobs incandescing with ultraviolet ghost hues. Hemaglobin, glycolytic pathways, porphyrins, mucopolysaccharides, glucosamine . . . The identities of the shapes proliferated like the mad voices that had been haunting her all day. She lost balance.

  Just look at the drug, Dirk insisted. It’s like soccer. Forget the audience. Pay attention to the game.

  Dirk’s voice snapped her free of her dreaminess, and the confusion of shapes and chromatic motions hazed back into fog. The drug’s cluttering sparks reappeared, hotter and more crowded than ever. She glided into the midst of it and began compressing the fiery motes with her will.

  The cloud of sparks broke apart only in certain ways, like fabric ripping along its weave. Carboxyl groups dispersed in fluffy trails of C02. The cloud thinned, and quakelike waves surged through the tangle of the drug’s cell-receptor enzymes. Rainbow chips cluttered around the magenta sparks, snapped into tiny boxes, and whisked away in the colorless wind of the plasma current: The iridal cubes were open-chain aldehydes locking into methylated molecular cages that trapped the drug so that the blood could swiftly carry it away to be filtered out in the liver. The reaction accelerated like a collapsing house of cards as one molecularly boxed group dislodged several others.

  The reaction would carry itself from here, and she withdrew. Bird chirrups whistled from the chestnut and the wooded hills behind the fence. The pastel thoughts of the cooks drifted from the kitchen with weary images of the bus rides to their scattered homes. Gruff mutterings spilled from the mangled minds absorbed in their eating. But these noises intruded no more now than the trillings of nesting birds. The journey into her blood had granted her some control.

  You’re getting good, Reena, Dirk said in his lambent voice. I’m proud of you.

  She opened her eyes, and the sky had gone syrupy with the day’s last light. Was she blessed or cursed to have lived this day? The first shivering star waded through the sky’s ethers. Impermanence blazed among the twilit clouds, and something of the supernal order she had just known stretched through her. What’s happening to me? The silence of the encroaching night offered nothing. Dirk—can’t you tell me? I’ve been asleep all my life—and now. . . . Now I’m more awake than anyone around me. Except for you. Who are you? If not Satan—a sorcerer? Have you made a pact with Satan? Is my mind given back to me in exchange for my soul?

  Reena’s imploring face filled all of Dirk’s awareness. Her vivid green eyes above sudden cheekbones looked startling. Bright hair, wrung in the evening breeze, nose sun-cut across the bridge like the start of a blush, and the sad curl of her lips above a soft chin were features from a love-harrowing dream.

  “Heiser!” Mr. Paawa’s voice jolted him free of his vision. “Move eet. Mistah Leonard stay waiting.”

  Dirk jerked upright to find himself sitting on a stool in the corridor of the Home. He sagged into his acceptance. Mind is the transparency of the body, his own voice said in a wet whisper, he wondered from where. And the body is the unconscious of the world.

  He ran fingertips over the battered windowsill before him, wanting to imbue himself with the texture of the present. The electric tension of the alien’s possession slackened, but the supernatural knowledge that had possessed him with Reena persisted. The braille of graffiti etched and battered into the sill translated through the pressure at his fingertips into neural impulses that became spurts of acetylcholine in the parasympathetic nerve endings under his fingerpads. The acetylcholine itself then hydrolyzed into acetylcholine esterase, and it was this esteratic compound that overcame the electrical impedance in the synapse and continued the nerve impulse on to the brain where ...

  “Eh! Braddah, sometime I jus’ like crack your head foah you.” Mr. Paawa’s mouth was beside Dirk’s ear, and his loud voice pierced Dirk’s cerebral spell.

  He blinked up at Paawa like a man out of a trance.

  “Wat you on?”

  “Nothing. I was daydreaming.”

  “Jesusmoddahmary. You wen pay tension watevah Mistah Leonard tell you.”

  Dirk stood up. As he rose, his glance flitted out the window, and he spotted Chud and Ipo in the playground under the skeletal shade of the jungle gym. Freezing voltage aborted his movements, and he froze staring through the window at the two hulking men.

  “Less go, or I wen drag you sorry ass in dere foah shuah—you hear me?”

  Dirk pulled away from the window and followed Paawa into the office. He figured he must have been entranced deeply, because the clock above the secretary’s desk said nine o’clock. Hours had lapsed. Mr. Leonard, bent over his desk, scribbling something, bald pate liver-splotched and freckled, looked up with clamped jaw and tensed eyebrows.

  “Dirk,” he said with a solemnity reserved for condemned men, “I had you sit out there for two hours so that you’d have the chance to think over just who you are and exactly why you’re here. What’ve you come up with?”

  Dirk shifted his weight, but his gaze never left the supervisor’s level stare. The crystal music in his head crushed his stupefaction into measured sounds: “I’m a ward of the state,” he said in a lucid tone that neither he nor Mr. Leonard had heard from him before. “That’s an alienating position for any youth to be in. I’m no exception. My displays of violence and recalcitrance are symptoms of my anomie. Reflecting on it, I really regret the difficulties I’ve caused you and the staff in my struggle to come to terms with my destiny.”

  Mr. Paawa, who had been watching from behind, stepped closer and exchanged an amazed stare with Mr. Leonard.

  “Anomie?” Mr. Leonard asked. “Do you know what you’re saying, Dirk?”

  “Of course.” Dirk looked at Mr. Paawa, and his joker’s grin revealed his backward bent teeth. To Mr. Leonard he answered, “Anomie is Greek to me.” He chuckled, and the weird intelligence in him flexed like a muscle. “Anomia meant lawlessness to the Greeks. I guess I have been lawless, at least by your strictures. Less sympathetic people would have incarcerated me by now. But you’ve tried to see it from my viewpoint. And I’m grateful. I’m the child of a prostitute and a soldier killed in an unpopular war. What does that make my heritage?”

  “Da fock you sayin?” Mr. Paawa’s bull neck bulged with indignation.

  Mr. Leonard held up a restraining hand. “I’m pleased to hear you speak so intelligently.” He squinted at Dirk. “You’ve obviously given this some thought. If you’ll back your words up with consistent action, I won’t be forced to take the drastic steps that I was prepared to carry through this morning.”

  “You got beeg trouble, boy,” Mr. Paawa interjected. “You memorize one cute speech foah us, but dat doan fix all da mischief you make or da sufferin of one Donnie Lopes.”

  “Donnie’s handicapped, Dirk,” Mr. Leonard went on in a less threatening tone. “But he tries to pretend he’s not. He won’t take a room on the ground floor with the younger kids. He wants to do everything everyone else does. You should be looking after him, not tormenting him.”

  “If we had da room,” Mr. Paawa said, standing close to Dirk, “we stay isolate you. Like one germ. Like da old-time lepahs.”

  “The other kids in the Home in your class are more afraid of you than Donnie is,” Mr. Leonard added. “So, you see, we have no place to transfer you—except to send you down to the Correctional Facility. Would you want that?”

  Dirk had listened patiently. At every other dressing down, he had glared defiantly or smirked or watched with torpid indifference. Now, the attentive, concerned expression on his face galled Paawa. “I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m reformed. Emendated. New and improved.” His smile showed molars. “These are my last ten months in the Home, and I intend to be exemplary in my behavior.”

  “Hah!” Mr. Paawa wound up toward a threat, but Mr. Leonard stopped him with a blunt stare and an avuncular smile.

  “I’m glad to hear that, Dirk. Of course, we’ll be watching you closely. But I have faith that this time you really will
keep your word. Don’t disappoint us.”

  Dirk nodded – and, with a charmed wink to Paawa, he left. As soon as the door closed behind him, Mr. Leonard’s calm smile darkened to a frown. “Something’s up. I don’t know what.”

  “Uh-huh, dass it. He da kine get one disease. An’ he like spread em aroun,” Paawa quickly agreed. “I know dat boy. He hidin sum ting.”

  “Maybe. Perhaps we’d best check his locker, search his room, see if he’s gone back to fencing hot goods. This time, though, it will be a matter for the police.”

  Dirk had paused in the corridor to look out the window at the playground. Chud and Ipo were still there, and he knew he had no choice but to go down and meet them. But first, he had to get the arc.

  When Dirk entered his room, Donnie sat crouched over the spilled contents of Dirk’s duffel bag, sorting curiously through the clothes.

  “What you looking for, wise guy?”

  Donnie, still in his red pajamas, popped up so suddenly that he lost his balance and fell in a sprawl over the scattered clothes. “Dirk, I’m sorry. I woke up and saw all this stuff on the floor.”

  “Yeah, Paawa got tough on me this morning.” He held out a hand to help Donnie up, but Donnie ignored it and lurched upright on his own.

  “I didn’t touch anything, really. I was just looking. Want me to clean it up?”

  “Nah. It’s my mess.”

  Donnie looked at him like his hair had turned to pinworms.

  “Look,” Dirk said, shoving his spilled clothes back into his bag, “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was pretty cruel to you, wasn’t I?”

  Donnie shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

  “Yeah, well, it won’t happen again.” He felt the chilled ovoid of the arc at the bottom of his duffel bag, and he closed his hand around it. His whole body shuddered, and Donnie, who was watching him, sank deeper into bewilderment. To avenge the deaths of Hunza and Peppercorn, he had hatched a lethal reprisal that involved finding an AIDS-infected syringe.

  “Hey, Donnie!” a red-haired, freckle-mottled kid shouted, sliding into the room. “The Judas Boys are in the playground, and they’re—” He skidded to a stop when he saw Dirk and started backing out.